Hotel D'Inghilterra - Royal Demeure - Rome

The Hotel d'Inghilterra is that rare thing, a shrine to fashionable cosmopolitan life firmly underpinned by an unimpeachable cultural and literary heritage. Its location on the via Bocca di Leone places it firmly in the high-end shopping quarter of Rome, between the Via dei Condotti and the Via Frattina. It is also very close to the Spanish Steps and the Casa di Keats e Shelley in the Piazza di Spagna. The rooms and suites are grand, some of the latter with private garden terraces. The hotel's restaurant, the Cafe Romano, is a favourite watering-hole of chic Romans and international literati.

Before the introduction of the railway, coaches and carriages from all over Europe approached Rome on the Via Flaminia and Via Cassia, entering the city at the Northern gate, the Porta del Popolo. In time the area around the Via Borgogna and the Piazza di Spagna became very popular with English travellers, young aristocrats on the Grand Tour together with poets and artists such as Keats, Shelley, Byron and Turner. At any given time there would have been a high concentration of English expatriates staying near the Spanish Steps and it is to these that the hotel owes its name - the 'Inghilterra'. This was in the high days of English cultural dominance in Rome, when there was a small but highly influential cluster of residents in addition to the visitors, among them social lionesses such as Lady Gwendoline Talbot-Borghese. Later, after radical urban expansion during the Pontificate of Pius IX, the hotel became a staging-post and home-from-home for a series of international literary luminaries including Franz Liszt, Hans Christian Andersen, Henry James, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.

The Inghilterra was consistently with popular with Italians too: it was Gabrielle d'Annunzio's favoured base in Rome; the patriot and freedom-fighter Vincenzo Gioberti harangued the Romans from one of the hotel windows in 1848, inciting them to fight for independence; Pius IX met Pedro V of Portugal here in July 1855, a unique instance of a Pope visiting a luxury hotel in Rome, commemorated on a plaque near the entrance. Another plaque records the visit of Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of the novel Quo Vadis, the basis of the MGM blockbuster film and as such an important, or at the very least unignorable, contribution to the culture of Rome. The hotel keeps a Golden Book which in recent years was signed by the Duke of Edinburgh in celebration of the Inghilterra's 150th anniversary. One of many fascinating footnotes the Inghilterra's history is that in its early days it was considered tremendously avant-garde and somewhat louche, even by Roman standards, on account of there being a fireplace in every room.

Note also the charming fountain, near the main entrance, from which the street takes its name. The Fontana Bocca di Leone (literally 'fountain of the lion's mouth') was built by in 1842 Antonio Sarti and is one of the more striking of the many small fountains, fontanelle, in Rome. The water cascades from the lion's mouth into a substantial sarcophagus, elaborately carved with Tritons, that would have been bought from a church and 'recycled' as a new and pleasing architectural feature serving a useful purpose.

HOTEL D'INGHILTERRAVia Bocca di Leone, 14 - 00187 Rome - Italy
Phone +39 06 699811 - Fax +39 06 69922243

Directions: From the A1 motorway take Roma North exit and continue along the ring road to junction 7 (Settebagni). Take Via Salaria and enter the city centre by Porta Pinciana. Continue to 14, Via Bocca di Leone. Garage parking is available for hotel guests (booking advisable) – contact the concierge: Tel. +39 06 699811 – email: concierge.hir@royaldemeure.com