The palazzo that houses Palazzo Portinari Salviati has been standing on this block since the fifteenth century, close enough to Brunelleschi's dome that guests on the upper floors look directly across the terracotta roofscape toward it. What the building had not done, until April 2022, was let anyone inside to see its fresco cycles: Alessandro Allori's Odyssey and Hercules scenes, painted across vaulted ceilings and lunettes, had remained private for the entirety of the palazzo's long history. A six-year restoration by Milan-based Spagnulo & Partners, led by founder Federico Spagnulo, changed that, converting the structure into 13 suites and 25 apartments while bringing those frescoes into rooms guests now sleep and dine beneath. The courtyard, visible in the images, gives an immediate sense of what Spagnulo was working with: Corinthian columns carrying round arches in the purest Florentine Renaissance mode, now covered by a frameless glass roof that floods the space with Tuscan light without disturbing its proportions, green silk upholstery and tall palms arranged around a classical marble figure at its centre. The restaurant ceiling is the most arresting room in the building, a coffered wooden grid set with an elaborate stained-glass skylight, marble mosaic floors below it, teal velvet dining chairs providing the only note of deliberate contemporaneity. Guest rooms divide between damask-walled palazzo rooms with herringbone parquet and grander chambres with terracotta floors, carved stone chimney pieces, and leaded windows that look as though very little has changed since Allori first put brush to plaster.

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