Hotel De Russie

Mario is absolutely magnificent ! His energy, his warm welcome and the whole experience was amazing !

There is a particular quality to Roman heat that Fellini and Antonioni understood better than any travel writer: the way it slows perception, makes the eye linger on surfaces, turns a piazza into something closer to a tableau than a thoroughfare. I found myself thinking of that cinema more than once, that Italian modernist instinct for treating the ordinary moment as worthy of contemplation. Rome in summer asks the same of you. What I hadn’t expected was how much the return to de Russie became part of that rhythm rather than a break from it. There’s a Cervantean idea I keep coming back to, the notion that romance is less about the grandeur of the adventure than the quality of attention you bring to it. Rome supplies the adventure regardless. What de Russie supplied was the attention: a place to metabolise the day’s accumulation of stone, light, and crowd before setting out again. The details were what made it feel less like hospitality and more like care. The spa, unhurried in a way that felt almost old-fashioned, the kind of quiet competence you don’t ask for but recognise immediately when it’s there. Maria’s presence at breakfast each morning, which turned a routine into something closer to a small daily acquaintance. Barbara’s cocktail recommendations in the evening, considered rather than performative, the sort of suggestion that comes from actually paying attention to what you’d said the night before. I don’t think I’d have romanticised Rome in quite the same way without somewhere that understood how to hold that romanticism steady, rather than letting it dissolve into fatigue by the third day. De Russie didn’t compete with the city. It gave me somewhere to keep loving it from.

Mario and his team were more than amazing! They made breakfast super special, the garden is beautiful! I recommend it 💯 food was excellent!