Going for Grand Hotel is the book recommended by Serena Dandini

Chi, at least once in your life, haven’t you entertained the fantasy of living in a hotel? Hotel life is the dream of permanent escapethe desire to abandon one’s biography crowded with useless objects and memories and to make a clean sweep cared for by an invisible organization that rearranges your bed every morning.

Director Dino Risi did it when, upon entering the Aldrovandi residence, he told the concierge that he would stay for a week and instead he stayed for thirty years. But if it’s a forbidden desire, then you might as well aspire to at least a Grand Hotel, the historic ones with frescoed halls and crystal chandeliers like the Ritz in Paris where Coco Chanel lived for years.

I didn’t know it was called that because it was Mr. Cesar Ritz who founded it in 1898an enterprising Swiss who started as a waiter and became “king of hoteliers and hotelier of kings”.

To tell us the story of these Arabian Nights hotels Stefano Pivatoprofessor of contemporary history, in the juicy essay Go for Grand Hotel of the necklace Finding Italy again (the Mill). Pivato tells the story of these fairytale places that only aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois could afford. It follows their changing fortunes from their birth, in the eighteenth century, as a symbol of a high-class holiday that made the Grand Tour in Italy a unique experience, until their decline and the advent of mass tourism.

Together with the author we will feel like we are staying in the sumptuous environments, from the Venetian lagoon to the Ligurian coast, reliving the events that made them legendary. Pivato, with the attitude of a passionate scholar, travels through the history of these places, reconstructing an unprecedented portrait of our country always poised between poverty and nobility, ready to adapt to the political events that have crossed it.

Love and power were intertwined in the luxurious rooms that inspired so much literature and memorable filmsone for all Amarcord by Federico Fellini, a cinematic masterpiece that projected the Grand Hotel in Rimini up to the Oscar stage.

All articles by Serena Dandini.