For over a century, the boys of a Florentine boarding school looked out from these limestone-framed windows onto terraced Baroque gardens falling away toward the city below. When Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Resorts Collection opened in 2025, the challenge facing Spanish father-son firm Esteva i Esteva was not invention but translation — converting three adjacent 16th-century UNESCO-listed buildings into 83 rooms without erasing the institutional dignity that gave the place its character. They succeeded by treating preservation as a design act rather than a constraint: the chapel, theatre, coffered ceilings, and frescoes all remain, and the courtyard garden, planted with ancient olive trees and punctuated by a contemporary stone wreath sculpture, carries the atmosphere of a cloistered academy rather than a resort. The interiors, handled by Florentine firm ArchFlorence, move between registers with genuine intelligence. The restaurant unfolds beneath a vaulted arcaded gallery where full-grown olive trees push through the floor plan and terracotta amphorae catch afternoon light against steel-framed windows — a room that feels simultaneously ancient and composed. Guestrooms range from the warmly layered, with landscape murals bleeding into real views of the Arno valley, to suites with iron four-poster frames and working fireplaces that recall the building's earlier life as private rooms for privileged scholars. The bar, lined with gilt portrait frames and amber-lit shelving, anchors the whole project in something resembling a gentleman's study — worn, curated, entirely specific to this place.

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