From former convents to palace hotels, these are 9 of Rome’s most extraordinary historic buildings you can actually sleep in
There are cities you visit. And then there is Rome, a city you fall into. A place that has been accumulating for three thousand years, layering empire over republic, baroque over renaissance, the sacred over the secular, until every street, every piazza, every doorway carries the weight of something that came before it. Rome doesn’t erase its past. It absorbs it. It builds on top of it. It lives alongside it, sometimes in the same building, on the same staircase, beneath the same ceiling.
And some of those buildings are now hotels. Not ordinary historic hotels in Rome, the kind that are simply old, most buildings here are old. But unique Rome hotels that were never meant to be hotels at all. A former bank headquarters where you can sleep in the vault that once held Italy’s financial reserves. A Borromini-designed convent where the church is still inside the building. An Art Deco sewing machine factory with the original 1930s marble staircase still in daily use.
I’ve lived in Rome long enough to know which buildings carry their history well, and which ones are worth choosing for exactly that reason. This is Sleep Inside History: my guide to the Rome hotels housed in historic buildings worth knowing before you book. If you’re still deciding on the right area of the city, my guide to where to stay in Rome breaks down every neighborhood.
1. Corinthia Rome: The Former Bank of Italy Headquarters Where the Vault Is Now a Spa
I have walked past the building on Piazza del Parlamento more times than I can count. It faces Palazzo Montecitorio directly, the neoclassical palazzo that has housed Italy’s Chamber of Deputies since 1903. Something about the building always felt serious, deliberate, like a place that understood its own importance. It turns out there’s a reason for that. For most of the 20th century, it was the headquarters of the Bank of Italy.
Built between 1913 and 1921 by architects Pio and Marcello Piacentini, the palazzo was designed to project financial authority. Decisions made inside shaped the Italian economy. Its vaults held the nation’s reserves. Its council chamber was where people with enormous responsibility gathered to exercise it. And then, in March 2026, Corinthia Hotels opened their Italian debut here, and the building became something else entirely.
What the restoration team did is something worth understanding properly. They didn’t renovate. They excavated. Stripping back decades of later interventions, they returned the building to its original 1920s proportions and found what had been hidden for years: mosaics, stuccoes, carved cornices, painted ceilings, frescoes by Giulio Bargellini and ceiling paintings by Guglielmo Janni that had been obscured by later additions and were now, suddenly, visible again. The building remembered itself.
The Theodoli Heritage Suite was carved from the former Council Chamber. It looks directly over Palazzo Montecitorio. The original 1920s frescoes are intact. The ceiling painting, Janni’s allegorical map of Italian currency depicting civic virtues and national prosperity, is entirely preserved. Where Italy’s financial future was once debated, guests now sleep beneath a painted history of money itself.
And then there’s the spa. Built inside the actual underground vault where the reserves were kept, it is now an intimate subterranean space of mosaic tile floors, mineral stone and softened light, with three treatment rooms, two soaking pools, a Finnish sauna, steam room and ice fountain. Roman bathing rituals, in the room that once protected what a nation considered most valuable.
The culinary programme is equally considered — led by Michelin-starred Milanese chef Carlo Cracco, making his Roman debut with three venues including Viride, his signature restaurant overlooking the interior garden, and Piazzetta in the open courtyard.
I find something genuinely moving about all of it. The same building that once held Italy’s wealth, its reserves, its financial decisions, now measures value in an entirely different currency.
Before you check in: Request information about the Theodoli Heritage Suite specifically. If you can’t stay in it, ask to see it. The ceiling alone is worth the conversation. Corinthia Rome is in Campo Marzio, one of the most beautiful neighborhoods to explore on foot — my 7 day Rome itinerary covers this whole area in detail.
2. Singer Palace Hotel: The Former Sewing Machine Factory With a Marble Staircase Worth Publishing
There is a side street off Via del Corso, close enough to Piazza Venezia that you can hear the traffic, where a building stands that most people walk past without a second look. They’re missing something.
Architect Mario Loreti designed the Palazzo Singer for the American Singer Corporation in 1930, and he built it with such precision, such considered detail, that the result appeared in the pages of Domus magazine in 1932. Not as a hotel. As architecture worth publishing. The cantilevered marble staircase. The panelled vintage lifts. The bas-reliefs on the facade. The stained glass. A corporate headquarters for a sewing machine company that happened to be, in someone’s considered opinion, remarkable.
Singer eventually left. The building changed hands, became bank offices, and sat quietly through the rest of the century. In 2018, the Visocchi family transformed it into a 29-room boutique hotel, and they kept almost everything. The marble staircase is exactly as Loreti built it. The vintage lifts still run. Vintage sewing machines sit in the entryway, not as decoration exactly, more as acknowledgment. This building was built for this. We remember that.
The rooms fit themselves around the original Art Deco structure of the building, each one shaped by the bones of a 1930s palazzo rather than imposed upon it. The rooftop, Jim’s Bar and Le Terrazze, serves cocktails drawn from the period, reinterpreted. On a warm Roman evening, looking out over the skyline from a building that an American company built in Mussolini’s Rome to sell sewing machines, something settles into place. The strangeness of it becomes, quietly, the point.
Before you check in: Look at the facade before you walk through the door. The bas-reliefs are original. Then find the marble staircase. Run your hand along the banister. It appeared in an architecture magazine in 1932. It’s still there.
3. Hotel Locarno: The Art Nouveau Hotel Where Wes Anderson Found the Grand Budapest
Since 1925, Hotel Locarno has been exactly what it is. The wrought iron banisters, the cage elevator, the fireplace in the lobby, the rooftop garden overlooking Rome’s rooftops, all of it still here, unchanged, unapologetic about what it is and what it has always been.
Founded by a Swiss family on a quiet street just off Piazza del Popolo, the hotel accumulated its identity slowly, the way the best places do. During the Second World War the Nazis seized it and used it as a base. Then the Americans arrived and used it differently, there are stories of GIs playing table football in the lobby.
After the war, as Italy began its reinvention and Cinecittà started pulling Hollywood to Rome, the artists who couldn’t afford Via Veneto and didn’t want it anyway found their way here. Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina were regulars, sitting by the fireplace. The painters of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo like Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Toti Scialoja argued about art until the early hours in the same bar where the paparazzi gathered during the Dolce Vita years. Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso had such a legendary night at Piazza del Popolo in 1966 that they barely made it back to their rooms. Basquiat came. Borges came. Orson Welles came. And Wes Anderson came, and stayed in Room 605 — called Matilde di Canossa — for weeks, writing the screenplay for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The room still exists. You can book it.
Before you check in: Go to the bar in the evening and order something bitter. Sit somewhere you can see the whole room. You’re in the same space where Fellini worked undisturbed, where Kerouac drank himself sideways, where Wes Anderson imagined a fictional grand hotel while staying in a real one. If you want to explore more of Rome’s bar culture beyond the Locarno, here are my favorite aperitivo spots in Rome.
4. Palazzo Ripetta: A 17th-Century Papal Convent Where Women Learned to Make Sails
I think about the women who lived here. Pope Innocent XI commissioned this building in the 1600s for the nuns of Saint Dorotea, with a specific and unusual purpose: to shelter women who had been abandoned, and to teach them skills, tailoring, sail-making, work that would allow them to survive independently. For nearly three centuries, this building on Via di Ripetta was exactly that. A place of refuge. A place where women who had nowhere else to go came and stayed, and learned, and built lives.
The church inside the complex was added in 1728 by Pope Benedict XIII, designed by the Marquis Gerolamo Theodoli. The fresco on the ceiling, Giacomo Triga’s Il Trionfo della Divina Provvidenza, is still there. The original bust of Pope Innocent XI is still there. A marble sarcophagus from the 3rd century sits in the internal courtyard, serving now as a fountain, because this is Rome and that is simply how things work here.
The building became a hotel in 1990, but not an ordinary transformation. Architect Luigi Moretti, one of the key figures of Italian Rationalist architecture, shaped the conversion, and his language, the sinuous corridors, the organic geometry, the expressive curvature of the spaces, runs through everything. A 2022 renovation by designer Fausta Gaetani built further on what Moretti created. The result is layered in the way that only very old buildings can be layered: 17th-century papal architecture, a Rationalist modernist intervention, a contemporary five-star hotel, all of it coexisting in the same building on the same street.
Former residents of the convent, elderly women who grew up here, still return sometimes. The hotel staff know them. I don’t know why that detail stays with me, but it does. It says something about what kind of place this is, and what it has always been.
Before you check in: Ask the concierge to show you the church inside the hotel. The fresco by Triga on the ceiling is not something you expect to find in a hotel corridor. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It does.
5. Orient Express La Minerva: A 17th-Century Palace in the Shadow of the Pantheon
There is a piazza behind the Pantheon, quieter than you’d expect given how close it is, where a Bernini elephant carries an Egyptian obelisk on its back and has been doing so since 1667. The piazza is named for the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built over a temple to the goddess Minerva. The palazzo facing it has been receiving guests since the 17th century. Nobility, Grand Tour travelers, intellectuals, all of them looked out at the same square, the same elephant, the same sense of Rome carrying its own history without much effort.
Orient Express acquired and restored the building, bringing in Franco-Mexican designer Hugo Toro to work with its interiors. His language borrows from Art Deco while staying rooted in what Roman architecture has always done: work with what exists rather than against it. The original columns are still here. Roman sculptures are still here. Toro understood that the building already had a point of view and his role was to amplify it, not replace it.
The rooftop restaurant, Gigi, looks directly at the Pantheon. Seven floors above a piazza that has been gathering Romans for centuries. The spa draws from Ottoman hammam traditions. Everything here has been thought about in relation to what already existed, which is the only appropriate response to a building this age.
Before you check in: The Pantheon is a six-minute walk. Go at dusk, after dinner, when most of the day tourists have left. Then walk back through the piazza and look up at the building you’re sleeping in. It was old when the hotel was already old.
6. Hotel Vilòn: An 18th-Century Palazzo Behind the Borghese Gallery With 18 Rooms
There’s a street near Piazza Borghese that most visitors to Rome never find. It’s not hidden exactly, but it requires the particular attention that Rome rewards, the habit of looking down side streets and wondering what’s there. Hotel Vilòn is what’s there.
Behind Palazzo Borghese, 18 rooms in a building whose history moves through the 18th and 19th centuries without arriving anywhere particularly definable, which is part of the point. Designers Paolo Bonfini and Giampiero Panepinto took the building’s accumulated past seriously, blending Rococo details, neoclassical proportions, and mid-century modernism into something that feels genuinely curated. The different layers are present in the ceiling heights, the architectural details that predate the hotel by centuries, the quality of light in rooms that were designed for a completely different way of living.
Eighteen rooms means a level of attention that larger hotels cannot replicate. The courtyard garden, which was once the outdoor space of a Roman palazzo and before that various other things, is now one of the quietest places in central Rome. The Adelaide cocktail bar opens onto it in good weather. The concierge handles requests as though they are personal requests, because with 18 rooms, they essentially are.
Before you check in: Ask for a room that faces the courtyard. Then spend at least one evening in it, doing very little, which is the correct response to being in a 200-year-old Roman garden.
7. Hotel de Russie: The Noble Palazzo That Became Italian Television
There is a fact about Hotel de Russie that even its regular guests often don’t know, and that makes it considerably more interesting than it already was. The building was originally designed in the early 19th century by architect Giuseppe Valadier, commissioned by Marquis Francesco Lucernari, as a noble palazzo with terraced gardens cascading toward Pincio Hill. It became a hotel and a cultural hub, hosting Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, the Russian Ballet in 1917. Then, after the Second World War, it was requisitioned and eventually became the headquarters of RAI, Italy’s national public broadcaster, for roughly five decades. The palazzo that had hosted an entire generation of European artistic life became the nerve center of Italian television until the late 1990s.
Rocco Forte reopened it as a hotel in 2000, and what was recovered in the process is worth knowing. The Secret Garden, a terraced Italian garden that descends behind the building, was designed by Giuseppe Valadier in the early 19th century. It remains one of the most beautiful private outdoor spaces in Rome: rose bushes, orange trees, a small waterfall, the particular quality of light that exists only in a Roman garden in the late afternoon. Most guests don’t spend enough time there.
The building’s past lives are woven into its identity with elegance. The Picasso suite takes its name from the painter who stayed for three months in 1917. The Stravinsky Bar is named for another regular. Not nostalgia exactly. More like a building that knows what it has been and carries it well.
Before you check in: Ask about the Secret Garden specifically, because it’s possible to visit without staying. If you are staying, spend an afternoon there rather than going out. One of the oldest continuously maintained private gardens in central Rome is included in your room rate.
8. Donna Camilla Savelli: A Borromini Convent in the Heart of Trastevere
There are two words attached to this building that change the conversation immediately. The first is Borromini. The second is Trastevere.
Francesco Borromini is one of the most extraordinary architects who ever worked in Rome, and the buildings he left behind are among the most remarkable in a city that does not suffer from a shortage of remarkable buildings. His spatial language, the curves, the way he handled light, the feeling in his buildings that something is always slightly in motion, is unique. When Borromini designed a convent for the nuns of Sant’Anna in the 17th century, in the neighborhood of Trastevere, the result was a building that still feels alive in a way that purely functional architecture rarely does.
The church he built within the complex is still here. The cloisters are still here. The garden is still here. The quality of light that enters a Borromini building obliquely, pooling in unexpected places, changing the color of stone in ways that feel almost theatrical, that’s still here too. The hotel, now managed by VRetreats, has preserved the structure with genuine care. Guests move through corridors that Borromini conceived, sleep in rooms that look out onto spaces he designed, wake up in a building that has been a convent, a place of shelter, a place of prayer, and is now a place to rest.
Inside the former convent, something close to silence. Outside, Trastevere is full of noise and life and the particular energy of a Roman neighborhood that has remained, against considerable odds, genuinely itself — and some of the best restaurants in Rome. Inside the former convent, something close to silence.
Before you check in: Stand in the church inside the hotel for a moment. Look at how Borromini handled the geometry of the space. Then, later, lie in your room and notice the quality of the light. Borromini buildings are different. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll understand why people have been writing about them for four centuries.
9. The First Arte: A 19th-Century Noble Palazzo Living Its Third Life as a Gallery Hotel
The building on Via del Vantaggio was a nobleman’s private residence in the 19th century. Its structure makes this clear to anyone paying attention: the piano nobile with its taller ceilings and larger windows occupies the floor where the family would have lived and received. The residential levels above have smaller rooms, lower ceilings, a domestic hierarchy that was entirely deliberate and is, remarkably, still completely legible.
Architect Antonio Marincola, who oversaw both the original transformation into a hotel and the 2024 renovation, made the decision to preserve that hierarchy. Not to erase the palazzo’s domestic logic in order to impose a uniform hotel aesthetic, but to work within it, to let the building’s original structure shape the experience of staying in it. When you move between floors at The First Arte, you feel the difference. That’s intentional.
What the hotel has added to this structure is a collection of over 200 original works of contemporary Italian art, curated by Galleria Mucciaccia. Each floor is dedicated to a different artist — so the experience of moving through the building is also a movement through different artistic worlds. Works appear in corridors, in rooms, in common spaces, with large-scale sculptures in shared areas and smaller pieces in the guestrooms themselves, designed for private contemplation rather than display. Preparatory sketches are shown alongside finished pieces. A 19th-century aristocratic domestic space, filled with the artistic production of the 21st century, floor by floor.
The hotel doesn’t treat the collection as permanent or fixed. It hosts temporary exhibitions of emerging artists alongside the permanent collection, which means the building is always in a state of becoming. Until 31 July, Italian artist Luca Gnizio has three works installed in the communal spaces — striking pieces made from post-consumer recycled materials, reflecting a creative philosophy built around environmental and social responsibility. They sit alongside the existing collection without disrupting it, which is exactly the point.
Before you check in: Notice the ceiling heights as you move between floors. The difference is not a quirk of renovation. It’s the original domestic hierarchy of a Roman palazzo, perfectly intact.
The Best Historic Hotels in Rome: Why These Nine Are Worth Knowing
What stays with me, living in this city, is the ease of it. The way Rome absorbs its own transformations without apparent effort. A bank becomes a hotel. A convent becomes a place of rest. A sewing machine company’s headquarters becomes somewhere people choose to sleep because the staircase is beautiful. A nobleman’s palazzo becomes a contemporary art gallery. The building doesn’t disappear in any of these transitions. It insists on being known for what it was, even as it becomes something new.
These nine hotels are, in the end, just the most recent expression of something Rome has been doing for three thousand years: finding new purpose for old things without erasing what they were. You check in. You sleep beneath a painted history of money, or in a room that looks out onto a Borromini cloister, or in a building where the marble staircase was considered remarkable enough to publish in 1932. And Rome, which has been accumulating stories in its walls since before the concept of a hotel existed, adds yours to the collection.
If the buildings on this list have opened a door into Rome’s architectural past, my guide to the best palaces in Rome goes even deeper. And when you’re ready to leave the city, here are the best day trips from Rome for anyone wanting to explore beyond the walls.
What are the most unique historic hotels in Rome?
Rome’s most extraordinary historic hotels are those housed in buildings with a completely unexpected former life: Corinthia Rome (former Bank of Italy headquarters, with a spa in the original vault), Singer Palace Hotel (former Singer sewing machine company HQ, with the original 1930s marble staircase intact), Palazzo Ripetta (a 17th-century papal convent with the church still inside the hotel), and Donna Camilla Savelli (a Borromini-designed convent in Trastevere).
What does it mean to stay in a Rome hotel with history?
The most interesting historic hotels in Rome aren’t just old buildings. They’re buildings where the former life is still present: architecturally, spatially, in the details of the rooms and corridors. Staying in one means sleeping in a space that was designed for a completely different purpose, and where that purpose is still visible.
Which Rome hotels are housed in former convents?
Two of Rome’s most beautiful boutique hotels occupy former convents: Palazzo Ripetta, a 17th-century papal conservatorio on Via di Ripetta, and Donna Camilla Savelli in Trastevere, designed by Borromini. Both have preserved the original religious structures, including churches and cloisters, within the hotel.
Is Corinthia Rome really in a former bank?
Yes. Corinthia Rome occupies the former headquarters of the Bank of Italy, a neoclassical palazzo on Piazza del Parlamento designed by Pio and Marcello Piacentini and built between 1913 and 1921. The hotel’s spa is located in the building’s original underground vault.
