Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The 16th-century Collegio Nazareno is the oldest scholastic institution in Rome, and one of the oldest in Italy. Situated in the Rione di Trevi – the fountain is two blocks away – the palazzo educated the city’s underprivileged boys and orphans (and later the sons of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy) under the auspices of the charitable Scuole Pie, founded 1617, until the school’s closure in 1999. Its benefactors were princes and popes (often one and the same man, back in the day). It resisted the occupations of both Napoleon and the Nazis. Today, its top floor houses the headquarters of the Partito Democratico; firebrand opposition leader Elly Schlein probably enjoys the views from its vast roof terrace when on her coffee break.The building is a masterclass in history as mosaic, combining splendid art, architecture and interiors created centuries apart. It’s this Rome – the one of intermingling aesthetics spanning eras – that film director Luca Guadagnino has engaged with in his most recent project: the reinvention of this patrician Collegio as a luxury 26-room boutique hotel. Those who follow Guadagnino’s career will know that he has an outsized hand in creating his films’ visual environments. From the bourgeois patina of the family villa in Call Me by Your Name to the cold-toned Bauhaus rooms through which Dakota Johnson pirouettes and jetés in his 2018 remake of Suspiria, he curates colour, texture and furniture to set moods and establish identities.So it is here at the Collegio, now called Palazzo Talìa. Along with the hotel’s signature suite, all of its common spaces, from the soaring sitting rooms and verdant courtyard to the restaurant and subterranean spa, have been created by Studio Luca Guadagnino, the interior-architecture practice the director set up in 2017. To date, his side hustle has designed three of his own residences, as well as private house commissions in Venice, Milan and on Lake Como, and retail boutiques in New York and Rome.Palazzo Talìa is Guadagnino’s first foray into hospitality. The hotel’s owner, Elia Federici, chairman of property developers Gruppo Fresia, brought him on board to set a tone in all the public-facing areas (the remaining 25 hotel rooms were designed by Mia Home Design Gallery and Laura Feroldi Studio). “The diversity of the building, the various renovations during the past two centuries, the huge courtyard all convinced me that there was the potential to reproduce the way of living in a palazzo of the Renaissance,” Federici says. “I was introduced to Luca by a mutual friend. I thought he could give an unconventional design to a place full of history and art.” Guadagnino was intrigued by the novelty of creating interiors for a wholly different purpose. “If you come to Rome, a hotel like this, you want to diffuse yourself in beauty, comfort and softness. So, for me, everything” – colour, light, textures – “needed to exude that pleasure.” Sensuality and detail: signatures of the Guadagnino vision. Surfaces beckon with nacre and sheen, pebbly-ness and pleats, silken or nubbly textures. The dense custom-designed carpets give deliciously underfoot, their palette one of rich blue and dusty pink, rust and buttercream, a sage green that’s reprised throughout the hotel. The walls of the bar are lined with small rectangular blown-mirror panels, their corners fixed with enamelled metal pegs like pastilles; they reflect back watery abstracts of the 17th-century ceiling frescoes, creating the sense of being inside a shimmering jewel. The railings of the monumental staircase leading to the first floor are wrapped in plissé leather, the rich bordeaux red articulated in neat incremental folds. “That was done entirely by hand,” says Studio designer and hotel project lead, Pablo Molezún, as I resist the urge to run my fingers along it again and again. (“No, do it!” Guadagnino says. “I love that it’s asking you to touch it.”) “Tactility and materiality are everything,” continues Molezún. “Every surface and item is conceived with material three-dimensionality. This, and how the lines of the ground floor envelop you – they are what make the experience of the spaces intimate.” “That’s a good word for what we’ve done here,” adds Guadagnino. “I prefer ‘intimate’ to ‘exclusive’” – for the purposes of describing the hospitality he proposes. “The aesthetic is maximalist but with the rigour, let’s say, of minimalism. Because if you apply minimalism per se, you lose the thread of the pleasure.”Guadagnino sometimes elaborates concepts for entire projects – whether a scene, a set or a private house – from a single object or detail. At Palazzo Talìa, that detail is a museum-quality 1940s chandelier designed by the Venetian artist Napoleone Martinuzzi, which Guadagnino first saw, years before he knew about Federici’s hotel project, in the Milan showroom of decorative-arts dealer Rita Fancsaly. Very much at home in the late-renaissance architecture, but decidedly modern, the chandelier – nearly 3m tall – now hangs from the cross-vaulted ceiling in the reception foyer, visible from the cobbled street.This mettersi in confronto – the interface between old and new – was always Guadagnino’s intention. “We didn’t want to deny the presence of the Collegio; but it was all about how the details would make this august and full-of-history place dance, make love with, speak to contemporaneity. You know, in Rome I find there’s sometimes still a resistance to the idea of dialogue with the contemporary.” We are walking along a cathedral-like first-floor corridor, where the Studio’s interventions are subtle but somehow change everything. The original beams of the tall wood ceiling are covered in ornate decorative motifs, on the upper walls a fresco cycle is framed in quadratic scenes; both are echoed in the geometric patterns and hues of the custom Studio runner on the marble floor. The matte technical lights he has added illuminate both the frescoes and rows of marble busts, some dating to antiquity. “The past lives, the past becomes something else – or maybe something again – when it’s in dialogue with the future.”The beauty of Palazzo Talìa is that it, like so much of the building’s past, is unique and handmade. Much of the furniture throughout is one-off and created by the Studio; the few pieces that weren’t, such as the clutch of Gae Aulenti Locus Solus chairs at the concierge desk, are special editions. The long, lean Frenesi wall sconces that recur along hallways are a design by the Studio for FontanaArte, created in 2022. A small sitting room off the bar is dominated by a massive six-metre sage‑green double sofa, its low backrest undulating in a subtle wave. “Instead of trying to pretend that the room isn’t big enough to be a salone, we owned it,” Guadagnino says as he sits down. “We occupied the entirety of the place. You’d think of this couch for a much bigger room.”“It steers you to interact,” says Molezún.“It’s a great place to find a wife,” Guadagnino laughs, leaning back over the rest in imaginary conversation with someone on the other side. In the courtyard, the Studio enlisted Roman landscape designer Blu Mambor to create a tropical Mediterranean garden, thick with potted palms (including two soaring mature Kentia palms from Sicily). In the restaurant – where Sorrentine chef Marco Coppola and Angelica Federici, Elia’s daughter and the creative director of the hotel’s operations, have made a menu combining Italian classics with some international must-haves – earth-coloured curtains surround banquettes. Around the corner, an elliptical staircase leads down into the spa, where the showpiece is a caldarium pool under a barrel vault ceiling covered in glistening metal-patina tiles. The sauna’s cedar walls eschew rusticity for rigour, with interlocking triangular panels in place of planks – “a Swedish sauna, as designed by us”, says Guadagnino.But the crown jewel of the hotel is the Aula Magna, the enormous first-floor salotto that was the Collegio’s assembly hall. When not in private use (it can be booked as part of a two-bedroom “presidential” suite), the Aula is open to all hotel guests and doubles as an events venue. Overlooked by an 18th-century gallery, which has been restored to its original gilt-edged pistachio splendour, is a room redefined by very few, very elegant Studio-designed things. Two groupings of low, blocky chairs are upholstered in ice-pink and orange bouclé. A handful of ceramicised lava-stone tables flare opalescent in the light that pours in from clerestory windows; Guadagnino and Molezún commissioned them from the Sicilian artisan Rosario Parrinello, who airbrushes the slabs to achieve the effect. Everything is grouped on two round custom rugs that combine motifs from across the rest of the hotel – somehow riotous and totally coherent at the same time.It’s among the most minimal of the maximalist interventions the Studio made. “I think it’s important every once in a while to look at where you are [in your profession], make a distillation and move forward,” concludes Guadagnino, when I suggest as much. “This project is the distillation of what we have done so far.”
