If only Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the protagonist of E. M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View, could experience the vistas of Florence’s Centro Storico from Collegio alla Querce, Auberge, a new hotel in the hills above town.
Brunelleschi’s imposing Duomo and Giotto’s marble Campanile have been admired from this site overlooking the city center since the 16th century. The hotel was originally the home of a noble Italian family. They covered its walls in frescoes, many of which are still visible today. It passed into the hands of the Barnabite monks in the mid–18th century, and Collegio alla Querce—college of the oaks—became a boarding school for the order’s elites. It closed in the 1990s and has been abandoned ever since.
