Facing Lucca's Piazza Napoleone — the grand civic stage that Napoleon's sister Elisa Baciocchi remodelled in the early nineteenth century — a neoclassical palazzo with ochre-washed render and deep green shutters has been converted into Grand Universe Lucca, part of Marriott's Autograph Collection. The building's four-storey facade, articulated with rusticated stone at street level and arched fanlight windows above, holds its formal composure against one of Tuscany's most ceremonially proportioned squares, where a merry-go-round still turns beneath the plane trees in winter. The interiors navigate the palazzo's bones — vaulted plaster ceilings, exposed timber beams in the upper rooms — with a contemporary palette that avoids the usual period-costume approach to Italian historic conversions. The bar and restaurant spaces preserve their original groin vaults, washed in warm limewash plaster and animated by clustered globe pendants and a sculptural starburst chandelier that hangs low over the dining room's terrazzo floor. Velvet seating shifts between deep plum, forest green, and dusty rose across the public areas, the upholstery choices bold enough to register against the muted stone tones without competing with them. Guest rooms layer saffron-yellow velvet headboards and patterned herringbone parquet with blue-grey abstract rugs and damask curtains, while the upper suites reveal their full ceiling height through the exposed beams — a reminder that the building was always meant to impress, long before it became a hotel.

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