Page 56 - Sharp Winter 2025

ROMAN HOLIDAY
TAKE A TRIP INSIDE PALAZZO TALÌA, THE STUNNING ITALIAN HOTEL REIMAGINED BY DIRECTOR LUCA GUADAGNINO
By Nour Abi-Nakhoul
I N ROME’S CITY CENTRE DISTRICT, MERE STEPS AWAY FROM
the 17th-century Sant’Andrea delle Fratte basilica and the hopeful tourists flipping coins into the Trevi Fountain, sits Palazzo Talìa. Unveiled in early 2024 after a massive restoration project, Palazzo Talìa is a bold boutique hotel that pays homage to the prestigious and impressive history of the building it exists in — and to the glorious, ancient city of Rome.
Palazzo Talìa’s building has a long and diverse history that can be traced back to the 16th century. During the Renaissance, it was home to clergies, nobles, and eventually, Michelangelo Tonti, the archbishop of Nazareth, who donated the space to the Piarists, a religious order committed to providing free education to poor children. Over time, the school gained international prestige, but finally shut its doors at the turn of the 21st century, and the building was left unoccupied — until Palazzo Talìa took on the mantle.
Palazzo Talìa undertook a massive restoration project, preserving its history and original character while hiring interior designers to recontextualize the space for the contemporary era. Famed Italian film director and designer Luca Guadagnino, with his interior design firm studiolucaguadagnino, crafted the common areas and the top-floor Terrace Suite with a cinematic perspective. The results are spaces that carry the feeling of film shots, every inch steeped in intentionality. The halls’ eye-popping carpet has highlights of intense pinks, blues, and burgundies that grant the space an uncanny and exhilarating sense of past-meets-present when laid out beneath 18th-century frescoes. Square salmon-pink and burnt-orange armchairs surrounded by pillars holding up Roman busts make the expansive space feel less like a hotel and more like the setting of a strange but beautiful dream.
The palazzo has 26 rooms and suites, the other 25 of which were crafted by Mia Home Design Gallery and Laura Feroldi Studio. The furnishings and fixtures, designed by a mix of local and international designers, have a modern and poppy feel while also retaining a distinctly Italian sensibility that builds upon the history of the building.
Walking the streets of Rome, you can see how the marks of the past are still visible in the present: contemporary buildings built on the structures of older ones, while they in turn were built on the structures of still older ones. The entire city is a living record of this thousands-of-years-long process of paying respect to the past; that’s what makes it so beautiful. It’s this same aspect that grants Palazzo Talìa its sense of grandeur: the material way it links the past to the present, honouring both.
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