At the Due Torri Hotel in Verona, you can brush up history simply by observing the details. All you have to do is pay attention and let your curiosity guide you. Sitting in front of  maestro Pino Casarini’s fresco in the lounge, you’ll discover the world of the Brandenburg Knights, while in the hall and other corners of the hotel you’ll admire the paintings of the 16th-century artist Francesco Barbieri, known as “Il Legnano”. Just as revealing are the furniture and decor, which come in all the various styles of the 19th century. Walking through the halls, rooms and suites, and pausing in the armchairs as you go, is like leafing through a catalogue. 

It was in 1958, when his family bought the building after years and years of oblivion, that Enrico Wallner who reconverted the building to its original function as a hotel. Wallner was a passionate art collector with a cosmopolitan spirit. He was in love with beauty, which he had a knack of finding everywhere on his furniture-buying trips to villas, auctions and antique dealers.

 

He was particularly attracted by the many-sided 19th-century style revolution that accompanied the rise of the middle classes and, at once, the birth of the modern concept of hospitality. It was he who personally designed and furnished the rooms, and commissioned Pino Casarini to carry out the most important decorative work, like that in the Arena Casarini. This is why so many styles are to be found inside the hotel, all blending in harmony. From Italian Barocchetto – which originated in the Veneto region – to the Venetian 19th-century style, all lacquering and painting on wood, from the Louis XIV style, with its sumptuous forms and decorations, to the Empire style, austere and dark and full of references to Greco-Roman antiquity. There is also no shortage of details in the Charles X style, which came into being during the Restoration, its offshoots Biedermeier and Louis-Philippe, with its sparer, more romantic forms, and the Second Empire, characterised by the use of fine woods and intarsia. Last but not least, there are also plenty of the original, international touches typical of the British colonial style. 

The spaces of the hotel express this wealth of artistic styles and influences. The Classic rooms, for example, reflect the Empire style, which came into being under Napoleon. Its neo-classical taste exudes – with a hint of French “grandeur” – from the sumptuous, elegant furniture framed by precious bright-coloured wallpaper.

 

The neat, clean-lined junior suites are “classical” in inspiration. The rooms are enhanced by Morano glass lamps and gilded friezes, the bathrooms by pink marble and large mosaic-framed mirrors. 

 

The Classic Suite is pure Biedermeier, decorated with pale wood and without bronze decorations: the style moves away from the high-flown magniloquence of the Empire style with furniture designed to be comfortable, practical and tasteful, no longer neo-classical in form. Here it’s possible to admire a chaise longue, a full-length mirror, divanettes and Murano glass lamps.

 

The standout features of the Maria Callas Deluxe Suite, dedicated to the celebrated opera singer who stayed at the Due Torri Hotel many times when she was performing at the Arena, are the writing desk, the divan and the period furniture.

 

The Sant’Anastasia Presidential Suite, finally, measures 100 square metres and is the most spacious in the hotel. Looking over the piazza of the same name, it is also decorated in the palazzo’s original Empire style with attractive colour matches, the furniture blending in with the pearl-grey boiserie and grey-and-white squares of the ceilings.