Hidden away on Rome’s prestigious Via del Corso lies Palazzo Roma, the latest addition to the city’s luxury hotel scene from Milan-based designer Giampiero Panepinto.

The Shedir Collection, the savvy conglomerate and the brains behind the hotel, proposes restoring and upcycling as an ingenious solution to combat ancient Roman planning permissions.

Like the group’s other hotels, Palazzo Roma focuses on ‘restoration over cultivation’, as general manager Rosario Rubino claims. The construction method essentially entailed ‘building on top of another layer of history’ in the former regal palazzi of Rome’s former hedonistic empire to make a ‘lifestyle hotel that allows guests to experience the emotions of Rome in a new way’.

The aim was to redefine and reinterpret the building’s sense of place to inflict an even greater sense of history. ‘The starting point was to create a poetic relationship between past and present, between nostalgia and reality, recollection and imagination,’ as spoken by the Milan-based interior designer and maestro of the project, Giampiero Panepinto.

‘I wanted to tell the story of Rome in its entirety. Each piece brings its own experience, intersecting perfectly with each other, giving life to a precious and majestic work,’ he adds. And, truthfully, this notion gets materialised throughout – from infinite art pieces, frescoes and stuccoes, plaster casts and boiserie, to gilded ceilings restored by skilled artisans across Italy.

This attention to fluid luxe details flows across the hotel’s 39 rooms and suites. Each has its own floor plan, uniquely decorated in a varying palette of deep greens, reds, yellows and golds, alongside intarsia wood on the first-floor ceilings and fabric wallpapers on the second and third floors.

Photos Courtesy of Pietro Masturzo