Rome, Handed Over at the Suite Door

There is a gate on Via del Babuino that most people walk past, which is precisely the point. Behind it, twenty paces from the traffic between Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps, is a courtyard, and beyond the courtyard a garden, and beyond the garden a hotel that has been Rome's quiet drawing room for the better part of two centuries. Hotel de Russie does not announce itself. It receives.

The building opened in 1822 as a residence for the Russian aristocracy, and the guests it has taken since include Stendhal, Tolstoy and, in 1917, Picasso, who left with a suite named after him. Diplomats, dancers and film people have come and gone through the same archway. What has not changed is the arrangement of the arrival: car to courtyard, courtyard to key, key to room, in the time it takes to hand over a passport.

Then the garden. Giuseppe Valadier terraced this slope in the early nineteenth century, and the result, known to everyone as the Secret Garden, climbs the foot of the Pincio in palms, pines and clipped hedges, with a fountain loud enough to drown out the square. It is the reason a great many guests never quite reach the Vatican.

The suite as an address

Rocco Forte's Suites & Beyond programme begins where a hotel upgrade usually stops. Reserve a suite and a dedicated team starts shaping the stay before you have packed: check-in taken in the suite itself, so the room becomes the front desk; a wardrobe concierge; return airport transfers; breakfast served wherever you happen to be, including the terrace at seven, when the pines are still loud with birds. Welcome amenities are chosen around what you actually drink and read rather than what the hotel wishes you did.

None of it is theatre. The pleasure is in the absence of friction, in the sense that the building has anticipated the small things, and that the hours of a short Roman visit are not spent explaining yourself.

“A suite in Rome should not feel like a larger room. It should feel like a small apartment with a garden attached, and a city waiting outside the gate.”

The suites carry the house's history without straining for it. The Nijinsky Suite takes the corner above the garden, its terraces looking across the Pincio towards the umbrella pines of Villa Borghese. The Picasso Suite answers 1917 with colour and tactile fabric. The Valadier Suite has floor to ceiling windows and a French balcony above the Secret Garden, while the Popolo Suite opens onto a terrace over the piazza. Between them the hotel holds ninety-eight rooms and twenty-four suites, corridors hung with Robert Mapplethorpe's flowers, marble and mosaic underfoot.

In the evening the axis moves downstairs. Le Jardin de Russie cooks close to Italy, with the garden lit beyond the glass; the Stravinskij Bar mixes negronis under the arcade and fills, in the Roman manner, well after midnight. Below stairs, the Irene Forte Spa runs on Sicilian ingredients and is the correct response to a morning spent on the cobbles.

For a first stay, ask for a garden-facing suite and give the opening morning to the Pincio. Climb the steps beside the piazza, keep to the gravel, and in ten minutes you are at the Borghese Gallery with a booking for the Berninis. Walk back down through the gardens rather than along the streets. Do nothing until lunch.

Rome rewards people who know where to stop. The suite is not the destination, but it is the device that makes the city legible: a place to leave the noise behind, and a team to make sure you meet the city rested.