Florence is a city best known on foot, and few addresses put it closer to hand than Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The square opens before the green and white marble of the basilica, whose facade Leon Battista Alberti completed in the fifteenth century, and from its corners the streets run toward the Duomo, the Medici Chapels and the shops of Via de’ Tornabuoni. The Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio and Palazzo Strozzi are each under ten minutes’ walk, and Santa Maria Novella station, for the fast trains to Rome, Milan and Venice, is about two hundred meters away.
Hotel L’Orologio takes its name, and its whole sense of itself, from the clock. Each floor is a homage to a maison of fine wristwatches, Rolex, Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe, and each room is dedicated to a collectible model, with original paintings of it on the walls. The details reward attention: door handles in the shape of watch hands, taps that turn like winding crowns, a smoking room laid over an illuminated original floor. Downstairs, vaulted lounges in velvet and leather lead to a wood-panelled library with a fire, and to Bar de L’O and its long mahogany counter.
The rooms are dressed in mahogany, leather, velvet and rich drapery over wooden floors, with marble bathrooms carrying fragrances from the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, the historic Dominican apothecary around the corner on Via della Scala. Some look over the piazza and the basilica, some toward the Duomo or the Medici Chapels, others onto quiet Florentine courtyards, and at the top of the house two suites open onto private terraces.
Your Exclusive Villa Collection advisor arranges the stay directly with the hotel, from a Deluxe room above the piazza to a terrace suite over the rooftops or interconnecting rooms for a family, and shapes the arrival, the guides and the days beyond Florence around the way you like to travel.
