The Diva and the Sleeping Beauty: Inside Verona’s Due Torri

At Due Torri, the opera begins with a room change. Having found our original accommodation wanting, we are moved to the Maria Callas Suite. Giorgia Gazzuola, who oversees sales and marketing and has worked here for fifteen years, explains that Callas would greet her adoring fans from its balcony. Had I encountered a similar reception that morning, she wonders, with a smile suggesting she has identified another diva in residence. It is an exquisitely diplomatic way of describing a demanding guest. Unlike Callas, however, my public has yet to assemble.

Callas is a promising patron saint for a hotel in Verona, where the Arena gives summer evenings their soundtrack. Our suite offers more space and rather more character. Some tables downstairs stand on clawed paws; here, strange faces with lizard-like mouths rise towards those seated above them, as though the antiques would like to join the conversation. The bathrobes have unusually high collars. There is no obligation to sing, although the wardrobe appears prepared for it.

S. Anastasia Presidential Suite Floor

One floor down, beyond a blood-red chandelier, lies the S. Anastasia Presidential Suite, a 100-square-metre residence occupying its own private floor. Giorgia mentions a couple who have taken it for three weeks to celebrate the wife’s eightieth birthday. There is something rather cheering about reaching 80 and deciding that a single evening of festivities would be woefully inadequate.

Due Torri is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World, sharing a collection with Ritz Paris and Villa d’Este. Such company encourages expectations of effortless grand-hotel assurance. Instead, a display of vapes beside check-in strikes a curiously petrol-station note. The opening impression is hesitant, the hotel’s considerable pleasures less immediately apparent. They reveal themselves gradually, as you wander through the building with somebody who knows where to look.

Bar Due Torri

A palazzo that rewards wandering

The location is magnificent. Immediately beside Due Torri, Sant’Anastasia gives remarkably little away. Beyond its largely bare brick façade is Verona’s largest church, divided by twelve columns of red Veronese marble. Pisanello’s St George and the Princess waits above the Pellegrini Chapel. Work began around 1290; the exterior’s incompleteness makes the richness within all the more startling. Even the holy-water basins require sculpted human figures to support them. The hotel’s anthropomorphic furniture has distinguished neighbours.

Around us, Verona supplies narrow streets, handsome squares and sufficient visual distraction to compromise forward progress. Walking on the right helps keep the pedestrian current moving. Stopping dead to admire something requires a little more planning.

Grand Hotel Imperiale aux Deux Tours

The hotel occupies the fourteenth-century Palazzo dell’Aquila, an inn since 1674. Giorgia tells us that horses were once accommodated in the lobby, although subsequent guests required less stabling. Thirteen-year-old Mozart stayed with his father in 1769-70, Leopold recording their accommodation as ‘ai due Torri’. Later came the grander, French-accented Grand Hotel Imperiale aux Deux Tours. In 1867, Garibaldi addressed the Veronese from its balcony and was honoured with an eight-course dinner. The building’s history also contains darker chapters: three ministries of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò occupied it during the Second World War. Its next great reinvention came on New Year’s Eve 1958, when Enrico Wallner reopened the hotel, commissioning much of the exuberant decoration which survives today.

Crucifixion and Cocktails

The circus beneath the stairs

In the extended foyer, ammonites fossilised into the floor tiles reward looking down. The oils on the ceiling require the opposite posture. They belong to a collection of sixteen allegories by the seventeenth-century painter, Francesco Barbieri, known as lo Sfrisato: twelve months and four seasons. Giorgia offers a practical explanation for hanging paintings overhead: ‘we didn’t have space enough to use the standard walls’. As she points out: ‘The walls are already painted.’

A pale stone Crucifixion relief, framed in elaborate Gothic tracery against a vermilion wall, provides a rather solemn companion for a cocktail. Between this, the ceiling oils, and Pino Casarini’s painted knights, Due Torri sometimes feels less like a hotel with an art collection than an art collection with a hotel attached.

Arena Casarini

Then there is the circus downstairs, although the performance begins on the descent. Former painted tables, relieved of their duties, have been mounted along the staircase as artworks. Below, Pino Casarini’s exuberant frescoes transform the basement Arena Casarini into a procession of acrobats, clowns, dancers, and performing animals.

The room was part of Wallner’s great 1958 reinvention of the hotel, when Casarini, also a set designer for the Verona Arena, was commissioned to turn the basement into a theatre. The hotel remembers the years which followed as a particularly glamorous period, when Due Torri became a haunt of stars and celebrities. Giorgia recalls ‘cabaret’, explaining the choice of basement: ‘they didn’t want to disturb the other clients staying here’. There was space in the centre for dancing. Later the murals disappeared behind partition walls for decades, before being uncovered and restored in 2015. Today the room serves as a meeting and conference space. It is an unusually exuberant setting for an agenda.

Arena Casarini

There is more to see in the third-floor lounge, with its contemporary paintings and sculptures. Go up for the art, even if your room happens to be elsewhere. The group’s partnership with ArtVerona, the city’s art fair, gives its patronage a practical expression: the Premio Casarini Due Torri Hotel supports painters under forty through the acquisition of a selected work.

On our tour, I am told that the owning family’s principal business is industrial laundry, and that it supplies the hotel’s linen. This is a pleasingly practical foundation for a grand hotel. The sheets are Pedersoli Milano’s LinoVivo, and the towels and bathrobes come from the same company. After several days of hearing about celebrated former guests, I find myself unusually interested in the people responsible for washing up after them.

At the bar, a bartender wearing a Cartier Tank brings an appealingly traditional presence to proceedings. A Rabo de Galo provides the liquid accompaniment. There is something reassuring about a barman whose wristwatch suggests that time can still be measured elegantly, even when the evening has ceased to require much precision.

Due Torri Bar

Dinner wakes the building

The greater surprise is dinner. Bistrot al 2 occupies the Sala dell’Aquila, conceived with Gualtiero Marchesi in 1977. The surviving brass lamps, intended to reach over the tables, connect the room to the chef who helped reshape modern Italian cooking. The imitation wood veneer is less persuasive. A building with this much authentic material scarcely needs it.

The kitchen is now led by Salvatore Garofalo, whose roots are in Calabria and Puglia, but whose culinary education took shape in Parma, including a stint at the then Michelin-starred Panizzi. He subsequently travelled to Queensland, where a French chef became his mentor. His cooking has an adventurous streak, particularly in its willingness to bring land and sea together, while the sculptural crockery shares his enthusiasm for shape and presentation.

We begin with Trentodoc in a broad Franciacorta-style flute and beetroot meringue with radicchio and a yuzu sauce which leans sweet. Better is a carrot tartlet with pumpkin, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin oil, and an onion filling: spiced, light and held in a casing of exceptional delicacy. It disappears before the list of ingredients has quite finished registering.

In Verona, horse and donkey are part of the culinary vernacular rather than a provocation, and the occasional specialist horse butcher’s shop still survives. Here, horse arrives as tartare, accompanied by a smoked oyster whose yielding texture recalls egg yolk. Bitter herbs and a rich veal sauce lend definition and depth. It is excellent: the oyster insinuates itself into the meat without surrendering its identity.

Sala dell’Aquila

Stachlburg Baron von Kripp’s Vinschgau Chardonnay Riserva 2022, sounding rather like someone who might once have signed the hotel’s guest register, shows evident oak and some evolution, yet remains thoroughly enjoyable. The wider wine list suggests a cellar concentrated on generally young bottles. No sommelier is present at our dinner, a missed opportunity beside food which invites a more engaged conversation about what to drink.

The spaghettone is the dish I would return for. Soured butter gives the sauce a wonderful citrus lift, its fatty texture coating the pasta generously without becoming ponderous. Calvisius caviar supplies saline punctuation; katsuobushi flakes dance in the heat rising from the plate. There is an almost miso-like savouriness to the whole thing, exotic in its associations but completely convincing to eat. The animation is on top. The real pleasure is underneath, in that juicy, gloriously buttery sauce.

Langoustine follows with foie gras, yuzu, beurre rouge, more caviar, and crisp bread. On paper, this sounds like a negotiation between ingredients accustomed to being the most expensive thing on a plate. In practice, the citrus provides continuity and direction. Yuzu runs through the meal as a recurring idea, bringing brightness to combinations that might otherwise become exhausting.

Langoustine, foie gras, yuzu, beurre rouge, Calvisius caviar

Service occasionally loses its rhythm. Several courses into dinner, long after our bread plates have been cleared, a fresh bowl arrives, as though the kitchen has decided we should begin again. Such eccentricities are more than compensated for by maître d’ Marie-Claire, whose warmth, attentiveness and instinctive understanding of the table give the evening its human dimension.

The desserts, judging by their menu descriptions, promise less individuality than the savoury courses, hence we pass. The petits fours, however, recover the kitchen’s sense of mischief: Cuba Libre macarons with a properly assertive pinch of salt, miniature chocolate cakes, and crisp coffee chocolates embossed with the Due Torri logo. Hotel branding rarely tastes this good.

Dinner makes the buffet breakfast upstairs feel like a separate operation. The same hotel can deliver Garofalo’s precise tartlet casing and wonderfully judged soured-butter pasta, then return in the morning to a much more conventional register. The contrast is revealing. Due Torri already knows what excellence looks like. The challenge is to make it habitual.

From the rooftop bar, Verona reveals itself as a perfectly balanced composition of terracotta roofs, towers and spires, assembled and refined over centuries rather than imposed by any single hand. Beyond the Adige, Giorgia gestures towards the villas climbing the hills, an enclave she calls ‘our Beverly Hills’.

Maria Callas Suite

Inside, Due Torri presents its own, rather more eccentric accumulation of centuries: medieval masonry, a mid-century circus, operatic glamour, contemporary art, and a chef unafraid of Japanese ingredients. Wes Anderson might admire the sets; Fellini would surely recognise the cast. In some ways, the hotel embodies what makes Italy so compelling: history is not merely preserved but continually inhabited, embellished and occasionally contradicted.

By departure, I have become rather fond of Due Torri. I would return for Garofalo’s pasta, Marie-Claire’s warmth, and another wander through those extraordinary painted rooms. The hotel has something of a sleeping beauty about it, although waking this particular princess will require considerably more than a kiss. It needs sympathetic investment, a coherent vision, and a renewed sense of what five-star hospitality should mean. Yet there is something to be said for visiting now, before a future refurbishment risks ironing out the eccentricities which make it such a beguiling time capsule. After all, perfection is not always the same as character. Somewhere between the basement circus and a high-collared bathrobe supplied by the owning family’s industrial laundry business, it has won me over.