Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Resorts Assortment Opens in Florence

• The 83-room Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Resorts Assortment, has 4 eating places and bars, a spa, an outside pool, and delightful gardens.
• The lodge is housed in a former 18th-century boarding faculty positioned lower than two miles from Florence’s historic Piazza del Duomo.
• Visitors of the property can guide particular experiences and excursions, corresponding to a non-public viewing of Michelangelo’s “David” in Florence’s Accademia Gallery.

Auberge Resorts Assortment opened its first lodge in Italy yesterday, on March 2: Collegio alla Querce in Florence. 

The 83-room lodge, which was a non-public faculty within the 1800s, is a couple of mile and a half from Florence’s famed Duomo. It has 4 eating places and bars, beautiful gardens, an outside pool, and over-the-top Grand Suites as massive as 2,292 sq. toes. A room that was as soon as the headmaster’s workplace is now Bar Bertelli, a night cocktail-and-cigars spot. The Nineteenth-century chapel has been restored and is an ideal marriage ceremony venue.

“You may have rooms that actually look out on the Duomo, and you then flip round and your window on the opposite aspect of the room seems out on vineyards and olive bushes,” says Christian Clerc, the CEO of Auberge Resorts Assortment, in an unique interview with Journey + Leisure.

“Coming to Collegio will really feel like retiring to your little bubble the place you continue to really feel linked with town, however you possibly can sit by the pool or get a spa therapy,” Clerc provides.

Collegio’s La Gamella restaurant, with veranda and backyard seating, will serve comforting Italian fare. “On the restaurant’s coronary heart is Cicchetti, an open kitchen, the place visitors can get pleasure from an aperitivo or take a cooking class—it feels a bit like stepping right into a nonna’s kitchen,” says Lorenzo Maraviglia, the lodge’s normal supervisor. There’s additionally all-day eating at Conservatorio restaurant and poolside Café Focolare, which serves pizza and Florentine panini.

The bars and eating places purpose to cater to locals as a lot as lodge visitors and worldwide vacationers.
“We need to be certain our motels are additionally related for the locals—and what higher method to deliver the native tradition into the lodge than to deliver locals in for lunch and for dinner?” Clerc says.

The property’s spa, Aelia, can also be rooted in Tuscan therapeutic practices, with therapies incorporating olive oil, lemon, and herbs. The model partnered with Furtuna Pores and skin, which sources the components for its skincare merchandise from a farm in Sicily.

Auberge Resorts Assortment, owned by The Friedkin Group, is understood for immersing visitors within the artwork and tradition surrounding every of its 30 motels and resorts—so opening in certainly one of Europe’s artwork capitals looks like a pure subsequent step. “One in every of Collegio’s most extraordinary choices is an unique after-hours tour of the Accademia Gallery, permitting visitors a uncommon non-public viewing of Michelangelo’s David,” Maraviglia says. “Our knowledgeable guides lead a non-public tour by the gallery’s assortment of Renaissance sculptures and work.”
Collegio alla Querce is the most recent in a slew of thrilling European lodge openings for Auberge Resorts Assortment. Up to now 5 years, the model has guess large on American resorts—not too long ago opening The Dunlin in South Carolina and The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern in central California. 

“People have such a protracted love story with Europe, that for us, it was the logical subsequent step,” Clerc says in regards to the European growth.

Springboarding off the longstanding success of Grace Lodge, Auberge Resorts Assortment, in Santorini—a T+L reader favourite—and not too long ago opened Domaine Des Etangs in Massignac, France, the luxurious model has its sights set not solely on Florence this 12 months but additionally on London, the place it should open Cambridge Home by the top of 2025.

You’ll be able to guide a keep on the newly opened Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Resorts Assortment, at aubergeresorts.com. Doubles from $1,678.