Perched on the hillside above Fiesole, with Florence spread across the valley below, a fifteenth-century Franciscan monastery carries one of the more extraordinary attributions in Italian architecture: its loggia façade, with its sequence of rounded arches rising from the terraced gardens, has long been credited to Michelangelo. That building is now Villa San Michele, A Belmond Hotel, Florence, reopened on 28 April 2026 after an eighteen-month renovation overseen by Florence-based Luigi Fragola Architects, who served as both architect and interior designer in collaboration with Belmond's design team. The property comprises 39 rooms and suites distributed across the original monastery structure and its steeply terraced grounds, where box-hedged private garden terraces are cut into the old stone retaining walls. The interiors move with assurance through a palette of sage green, warm terracotta, and aged gold. Herringbone brick floors ground the rooms, laid against painted timber beam ceilings and walls hung with tapestries and decorative plates in a way that feels more like a cultivated private house than a managed hotel property. Luigi Fragola's material choices — onyx, straw marquetry, polished marble — bring genuine craft to the spaces without crowding out the building's inherent gravity. Rattan furniture and inlaid lacquer tables sit comfortably alongside antique armoires dressed in ikat-patterned fabric. Up on the open-air terrace restaurant, iron chairs with floral cushions face a panorama that takes in the Duomo and the full arc of the Florentine skyline.

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