I’ve lived in Italy for several years now, working alongside hotels and hospitality brands that put enormous thought into the experience they create for their guests. In that time, nothing has interested me more about Italian hospitality than the country’s family-owned properties. There’s something truly special about hotels where the same last name has answered the door for generations, and where changing a doorknob gets debated for a year before anyone commits.
Curious to learn more, I spoke with the families behind three of Italy’s great historic hotels.
At Locanda San Vigilio, I spoke with Bartolomeo of the Guarienti family, who have lived for generations on the tiny Lake Garda peninsula where their secluded 13-room hotel sits today. In Sorrento, Peter Fiorentino represents the family behind the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria, the town’s grand dame since 1834, with its famous terrace suspended high above the Bay of Naples. And in Rome, I spoke with Veruschka and Roberto Wirth of the Hassler, the family-run icon at the top of the Spanish Steps that has drawn generations of actors, royals and artists, from Audrey Hepburn to Princess Diana.
Maintaining a family-owned property is a unique undertaking. And through their responses, I kept noticing the same ideas coming through: guardianship over what they have inherited; continuity in a changing world; the restraint to know what not to change; and a sense of belonging — not only to their own families, but to the places and communities around them.
Talking to them, it became clear that they are preserving more than three remarkable hotels. In their own ways, these families are carrying forward a tradition of hospitality that has been passed from one generation to the next.
The Luxury of Restraint
Ask a hotelier what he owns, and most will start listing square meters. Ask these three families, and none of them used the word “own” at all.
“We feel very much like guardians of San Vigilio,” Bartolomeo told me, “with a responsibility to preserve what has made it special and keep it as close as possible to the place it has always been.”
Roberto Wirth reaches for the same word: “We see ourselves as guardians of the Hassler Roma. Our aim is to preserve the heritage of the hotel and the happy memories of the people who stay with us.”
Peter Fiorentino phrases it differently but means something close. For his family, luxury has always lived “in the continuity of gestures, in the attention to people,” rather than in the buildings themselves.
What impressed me most was where that sense of responsibility leads next: toward someone else’s family, not only their own. Bartolomeo describes guests who first came to San Vigilio as children, now returning with children of their own. “It makes our responsibility feel very personal; we are also caring for a place that holds part of other families’ lives.”
Roberto describes something similar at the Hassler: “Many of our guests are the children or grandchildren of guests who stayed with my grandparents.” Neither family is only protecting its own bloodline. In a way, they are protecting other people’s, too.
That same sense of responsibility extends to how they approach change.
Bartolomeo calls the architecture at San Vigilio a gift that “asks for restraint from us.” Veruschka Wirth puts it more bluntly: “Real luxury, I believe, is often about knowing what not to change.” Neither hotel stands still, of course. The Hassler recently redesigned its lobby with Jacques Garcia, while San Vigilio has added modern comforts to historic rooms. But both families treat change as something to be earned, rather than pursued for its own sake.
Not a Museum
Every one of these hotels has at least one late genius and one late monarch attached to its name. But despite their illustrious histories, these hotels aren’t museums. Their past is still part of everyday life.
“We try to live this cultural heritage with naturalness,” Peter Fiorentino says of the generations of artists and musicians who have passed through the Excelsior Vittoria, from Wagner to Caruso. “The stories of those who passed through here are part of the hotel’s soul, but they are not displayed like in a museum.”
Veruschka Wirth describes the Hassler in similar terms: “The Hassler Roma has never been a museum. It has always been a hotel created for its guests, and, in a way, a family home.”
At San Vigilio, the same idea can be found in something as simple as a tapestry. Hanging in the Grand Suite, it is part of the family’s own history, but remains a decoration guests can live with rather than an artifact kept behind glass. For Bartolomeo, the tapestry and the room are inseparable: “They belong together because they have lived together.”
I keep returning to those words: “lived together.” It’s the clearest explanation I’ve read for why an old hotel feels different from a museum. A museum preserves an object by removing it from use. These three families do the opposite: they allow the past to remain part of the present.
The Exhale
Ask someone about the view from a hotel, and you expect them to paint you a postcard. What I got instead were descriptions of what a beautiful view does to the body.
Bartolomeo describes the lake at night and the way it draws you in: “It settles on what is in front of you, and for a while everything else falls away.”
Peter Fiorentino sees the view as part of the hospitality, “when it invites you to slow down, to observe the light changing over the Gulf.”
At the Hassler, the view opens across the domes and rooftops of Rome. Veruschka Wirth describes it as “a kind of exhale.” She’s watched guests arrive “a little frantic, a little overwhelmed by the city,” then stop mid-sentence, compelled by the view to pause and take it all in.
For these hotels, the view is not merely scenery that enhances a stay. It is central to the experience: something capable of changing a guest’s pulse before anyone says a word.
A Sense of Belonging
Hotels can be worlds unto themselves, especially properties such as these. But how do you protect that carefully cultivated world while still belonging to the place around you?
“We belong to the life of the lake,” Bartolomeo says, describing locals who come to San Vigilio for an aperitivo or a swim. “Our responsibility is to manage it carefully so people can enjoy San Vigilio without the experience becoming overwhelmed by numbers.”
At the Hassler, Roberto Wirth pushed back when I asked whether the hotel sits above Rome: “We think of it as part of Rome.” And that connection is intentional. The hotel isn’t a world reserved only for the people sleeping there; locals remain part of its daily life, stopping for tea in the Palm Court or dining alongside hotel guests at Salone Eva. As his sister Veruschka explains, “That mix is very deliberate.”
Peter Fiorentino describes a similar tension in Sorrento. The Excelsior Vittoria needs to offer guests a sense of privacy and escape without separating itself from the life of the town around it. He calls it “a rare balance”: creating a hotel that feels hushed and private while remaining part of Sorrento’s daily life.
It would be easy to dismiss this as marketing, but I don’t think it is. What these families are describing is a genuinely difficult balance: how to remain open enough that a hotel doesn’t calcify into a theme-park version of itself, while protecting it enough that what makes it special isn’t worn away by its own popularity.
Above San Vigilio’s harbor, a sentence is etched into the stone, telling visitors to leave their business and the worries of the city behind them.
No one today knows who wrote it, and it predates every family in this piece by centuries. Yet each of them, in their own way and their own century, has spent a lifetime keeping that promise of Italian hospitality alive.
Across three regions and centuries between them, what these families do rarely gets called what it actually is: a discipline, practiced daily.
Rooms with a view exist everywhere. But the view alone is never enough. What gives these places their pull is the family standing behind them, deciding one generation at a time what to keep and what to let go.
That is the soul the whole world is really booking a night to be near.
And that is why I’ll never stop asking for a room with a view in Italy. And of course, a coffee with the owners.
