This New Luxury Rome Hotel Is a Homecoming for the Bulgari Brand — With an 'Unmatched Location,' 6 Restaurants, and a Gorgeous, 60-foot Pool

Welcome to Bulgari Hotel Roma, the luxury brand's new flagship, with a pool inspired by the Baths of Caracalla and 2,000-year-old marble statues.

Rome is in the throes of a luxury hotel boom with one blue-chip brand opening after another. The latest is Bulgari Hotel Roma, which opened in Piazza Augusto Imperatore in the heart of the centro histórico in June 2023. But Bulgari Hotels & Resorts is uniquely suited for expanding into the Roman market, because for the fashion-rooted luxury brand, this hotel opening isn't about making a mark on the Eternal City — it's a homecoming.

Bulgari Hotel Roma

• The hotel is walking distance from the Spanish Steps in the quiet but centrally located Campo Marzio neighborhood.

• There are six quintessentially Italian dining venues on-site, all helmed by Niko Romito, known for his Michelin-starred Il Ristorante in Milan and Dubai.

• The design is a celebration of Italian art, with an original marble sculpture of emperor Augustus from 1 B.C., Venetian-sourced textiles, and mosaics modeled after iconic Bulgari brooches.

• Many of the 114 rooms include stand-alone tubs, marble flooring, and private terraces.

• The hotel is full of lush greenery, with 4,500 plants inspired by ancient Roman gardens and curated by a Milan-based landscape design firm.

“We’re very fortunate, because international brands coming to Rome are precisely that: international. So they run the risk of seeing Rome with a foreigner’s eye,” says Silvio Ursini, executive vice president of Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, in an interview with Travel + Leisure. “We have the privilege of seeing Rome with an insider’s perspective.”

Bulgari was founded in Rome in 1884 and has been a symbol of Italian excellence from day one. This opening has been an inevitable part of the brand’s hospitality division since it launched its first property in Milan in 2004. But homecourt advantage does have its drawbacks. Before this property, Bulgari aimed to bring the best of Italy to cities like Paris, Tokyo, and Dubai. Opening a hotel in Rome, however, required an entirely new approach.

“For many other cities, we’re a well-known jeweler. In Rome, we are an institution,” Ursini explains. “Generations of Romans know Bulgari. We’re part of Roman families’ birthdays, weddings, graduations. So we need a hotel here that can be an institution not just for travelers but for Romans, too.”

The first step in creating this institution was a long one: it took them 10 years to identify and nail down a property. Establishing a brand-new flagship required finding the perfect location, one as precious as the gems you would find on Bulgari’s iconic Serpenti necklaces. The address Bulgari eventually secured is priceless: in the Campo Marzio neighborhood, minutes away from the Spanish Steps and the Bulgari boutique on Via Condotti. “The physical location is unmatched; it’s a largely quiet piazza, but we’re still in the center of Rome,” Ursini says. “Because in our business, a few hundred meters can make a difference.”

The 114-room Bulgari Hotel Roma is tucked into the building that was originally built by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s and was once the headquarters of the National Institute for Social Security (INPS). It’s a soaring monolith with towering columns and bas relief sculptures on panels surrounding the exterior. It’s across the street from the Mausoleum of Augustus — one of the most important monuments from ancient Rome — and around the corner from the Ara Pacis. This square has been sitting in neglect for 50 years, but everything is being revived, and the opening of the Bulgari Roma is part of a larger undertaking that goes beyond just renovating an old office building. “The square was literally dead, and we had the opportunity to revitalize it,” Ursini adds. “And our opening is a piece of that bigger strategy.”

The ambition for this opening is obviously lofty, but a stay here makes one thing clear: this is likely the most Bulgari of all the brand’s hotels. If as a jewelry outfit Bulgari is known for head-turning opulence, then this hotel captures that grandeur, but filtered through Roman motifs and then modernized by Milan-based architectural studio ACPV Architects. As soon as you walk in, you’re greeted by an original marble sculpture of emperor Augustus from 1 B.C. How did an artifact of antiquity make it to the vestibule of a hotel? Bulgari has been funding the restoration of 100 marble statues around the city — this is one of them. And if that level of gloss isn’t enough, this same vestibule is covered in Travertine marble in various colors, a symbol of power and affluence in ancient Rome.

It sets the scene for all the ways in which Bulgari Hotel Roma pays homage to the Eternal City. And in fact, Italy’s most renowned artisans and craftspeople were tapped to create pieces in support of that ethos. Some rooms feature mosaic marble flooring inspired by the very same patterns you’ll find in Villa di Livia, an ancient residence located about 10 miles from the city center. There are also custom-designed textiles by the Venetian masters at Rubelli: one is a saffron reimagining of the pattern on the Pantheon’s floor. And in the Bulgari Suite — the hotel’s largest at 3,229 square feet — the stunning bathroom includes a marble tub modeled after the fountain sculpture in nearby Piazza Farnese. It was fashioned out of a single slab of marble, and it was so heavy it had to be placed via crane before the suite’s windows were installed.

If you’re not living it up in that suite, bath configurations in other categories are pretty stunning, too: colored marble (red Jasper marble from Sudan, green quartzite from Brazil, yellow Brocatelle marble from Iran) sets the scene, and tubs are set against room-defining mosaic roundels depicting iconic Bulgari brooches. Yes, the references are plentiful, but if you don’t know them then you’re just staying in a fancy hotel with a rich sense of place.

Public spaces, too, are equally alluring and tranquil. Bulgari’s executive chef Niko Romito oversees the hotel’s six various dining concepts, including the fine-dining experience at Il Ristorante—Niko Romito and the all-day ground-floor venue Il Caffe, an impossibly lush space with outdoor seating underneath the building’s tranquil portico. Once construction of the piazza’s garden, which is directly across from Il Caffe’s alfresco tables, is completed, this will easily become one of Rome’s chicest hangouts (not unlike how Bulgari Hotel Milano changed the game for the city’s aperitivo scene).

The rooftop terrace — with 360-degree views of the city, including a section looking into the tomb of Augustus that will make you feel like you’re lording over Rome — delivers on both serenity and seclusion. Open strictly to guests during the day, La Terraza offers a gorgeous escape from the sometimes overwhelming buzz of the city. While it’s easy to chalk that up to the incredible vistas from this perch, it’s actually the way the space was designed that makes it so alluring. There’s a central bar from which drinks and snacks are served, and all around it are small clusters of couches and chairs. Each little seated vignette is discretely organized to offer maximum privacy. And between them are 200 potted plants inspired by ancient Roman gardens. There are aromatic herbs like rosemary and Russian sage as well as fruit trees and bushes like strawberry and bottlebrush. Plants — there are 4,500 in total all over the building landscaped by P'arcnouveau from Milan — are a major design detail of the hotel, helping soften more imposing elements throughout. But in the terrace, they help create a sumptuous oasis.

The opposite end of the building — its lower levels — provides a different type of relaxation via a multifloor, 16,145-square-foot spa, the centerpiece of which is a 60-foot-long pool. With eight marble-covered columns and surfaces cloaked with shimmering mosaics by Bisazza, the glamorous pool area is meant to evoke the extravagance of the ancient Baths of Caracalla. Because it really doesn’t matter where you sneak away to, Bulgari Hotel Roma never lets you forget that you’re in a house that Roman history helped create. “This is a tribute to Rome; we’ve employed Italy’s best aritsts to create a monument to Rome,” Ursini says. “And it’s something Roma deserves.”

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