Opening Shot is a column that peeks inside new hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops with dreamy interiors.
BULGARI HOTEL ROMA
Location: Rome
Designer: Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel
On Offer: Bulgari’s second Italian hotel arrives in the city where the brand was itself founded some 140 years ago. What’s more, it’s housed in one of Rome’s iconic rationalist buildings, completed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo in the 1930s. Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel restored the building and devised the interiors, including the 114 rooms and suites in palettes of white, yellow, red, and green. Each offers views over Piazza Augusto Imperatore or Villa della Frezza. A material palette of ochre travertine marble and burnt red brick connect the hotel back to ancient Rome; the marble mosaic roundels and handcrafted Murano glass and lights keep things up to date. The 4,500 new plants across both the interior and exterior areas, from birds of paradise and gum plants to herb and fruit gardens, promise a verdant future.
Standout Features: Fittingly, the Bulgari Spa soaks up the influences of local Roman bathing culture, including a green onyx bath for spa treatments and a Baths of Caracalla-inspired mosaic pool from which marble columns rise. The foyer boasts five annual exhibitions of rotating selections from the Torlonia Collection—first up, a seated Augustus as Jupiter in Pentelic marble, holding a globe and scepter. Modern goddesses might want to don Bulgari’s new “Ospitalità Italiana” necklace made for the hotel’s opening, with precious stones symbolizing the nine Bulgari Hotels and a rare ancient Roman coin dating to the first century.
Where better to wear it than one of the six dining options curated by Real’s Niko Romito, including a Bulgari Lounge and Champagne Bar and, overlooking Augustus’s tomb, the Il Ristorante–Niko Romito, which serves up the celebrated chef’s classics like potato ravioli with octopus sauce on Gio Ponti plates.
