Destinations
Villa San Michele Reopens in the Hills Above Florence
After an eighteen-month renovation, Belmond’s former monastery in the hills of Fiesole is open again, with 39 reimagined rooms, a Guerlain spa, and the gardens restored to their Renaissance design.
Some hotels close for a season and reopen looking much as they did. Villa San Michele closed for eighteen months and reopened in April looking, if anything, more like itself. Belmond’s former monastery in the hills of Fiesole, a short drive above Florence, is one of the most storied hotels in Italy, and its renovation was less a reinvention than a careful reading of what was already there.
The house dates to the fifteenth century, when it was a monastery dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel, and its facade has long been attributed, on tradition rather than certainty, to Michelangelo. Terraced gardens fall away below it toward the city, and from the archways the whole of Florence lies in the valley, with the Duomo in the distance. Little of that needed changing. The work was in the detail.
The rooms and the gardens
The hotel now holds 39 rooms and suites, reimagined by the Florentine studio Luigi Fragola Architects with Belmond’s own design team, the monastic corridors, Gothic arches, and terracotta floors kept intact and the rooms layered in Tuscan marble, wood, and ceramics. Among the named suites are the Limonaia, a two-story set with its own plunge pool; the Botanica, which takes its cues from the historic gardens; and The Grand Tour, occupying the rooms Napoleon once used as his headquarters.
Outside, the landscape studio Luca Ghezzi Garden Design spent the closure restoring nearly ten thousand square meters of grounds to the lines of a traditional Fiesole hillside garden: a rose walk, an iris garden, an expanded herb garden, and the citrus long favored by the Medici. The heated outdoor pool remains where it always was, cut into a terrace with the valley beneath it.
The table
The headline addition is Antesi, an eight-table restaurant set within the sixteenth-century loggia and led by executive chef Alessandro Cozzolino. The name comes from the Greek for the moment a flower opens, and the cooking follows it, three tasting menus timed to the exact season of their ingredients. Around it the everyday pleasures continue: refined Tuscan cooking at Ristorante San Michele, wood-fired pizza at the poolside grill, aperitivo at the new Bar Doccia, and sommelier-led tastings in the historic cellar.
The spa
For the first time the hotel has a proper spa, and it has chosen its company well. Villa San Michele Spa by Guerlain, the French house’s first in Italy, occupies three treatment rooms in the old convent, reached through a secret garden entrance painted with frescoes by the artist Elena Carozzi. A wellness program developed with the Milanese label La DoubleJ rounds out the offer, in keeping with the hotel’s stated turn toward slow luxury.
When to go
The hotel now runs from spring through the turn of the year, closing only for the deepest weeks of winter, so the season is longer than it was. Late spring and early autumn are the sweet spots, the gardens at their fullest and the Florentine heat off the valley. Rooms start from around €1,330 a night. Come for the city, of course, but the case for Villa San Michele has always been the opposite: to sit above Florence, in the cypresses, and let it come to you.
