Palazzo Fonseca has stood on Piazza della Minerva since 1620, close enough to the Pantheon that its rooftop terrace frames Hadrian's dome as a daily backdrop to lunch. The building became a hotel in 1811, accumulating two centuries of Grand Tour mythology before Franco-Mexican artist-architect Hugo Toro was given the task of making it contemporary without erasing what time had deposited. The result, Orient Express La Minerva, reopened in April 2025 with 93 rooms and suites that absorb the palazzo's original vaulted ceilings, marble columns, and Murano chandeliers into an interior world that draws from Art Deco as much as from Rome. Toro's palette runs to amber and burnt sienna, the walls finished in warm polished plaster, the rooms lined with richly grained burl wood panelling and leather-trimmed joinery that sits somewhere between a Roman senator's study and a 1930s ocean liner cabin. The guest rooms show the most interesting moves: a suspended blackened-steel television screen on a cantilevered armature divides sleeping from sitting without a wall, bouclé lounge chairs face columns of dark walnut, and inlaid parquet floors run underfoot in a grid pattern that picks up the geometry of the headboard millwork above. Downstairs, the glazed winter garden court fills with fiddle-leaf figs planted around curved banquette seating and rattan armchairs, a classical statue presiding over the bar in the arched recess behind. The rooftop, set with iron garden furniture and ceramic urns, needs no further decoration: the Pantheon does that work entirely.

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