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In 1927, the year the Principe opened its doors as the Principe e Savoia, Milan had already begun building its reputation as Italy’s business centre. So the hotel’s location in what was then a nondescript plaza called Piazza Fiume, far north of what was considered the heart of Milan, was less illogical than it first appeared. Although staunch traditionalists among the Milanese believed that everything that really mattered in the city had to be located between Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Scala, the fact that the plaza - then as now - overlooked the 19th-century-style facade of the city’s central railway station, Stazione Centrale, made it logistically convenient for the burgeoning business tycoons of the era (more under HISTORY).
From the very beginning, the Hotel Principe di Savoia has been a classy contradiction in terms - symbolising gracious living for a clientele focused on business, offering the traditional hospitality of a grand resort in an unapologetically urban setting, hosting captains of industry, counts of nobility and cultural icons with equal aplomb.
In 1927, the year the Principe opened its doors as the Principe e Savoia, Milan had already begun building its reputation as Italy's business centre. So the hotel's location in what was then a nondescript plaza called Piazza Fiume, far north of what was considered the heart of Milan, was less illogical than it first appeared. Although staunch traditionalists among the Milanese believed that everything that really mattered in the city had to be located between Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Scala, the fact that the plaza - then as now - overlooked the 19th-century-style facade of the city's central railway station, Stazione Centrale, made it logistically convenient for the burgeoning business tycoons of the era.
The Principe e Savoia was developed by a limited company called S.A. Acquisto ed Esercizio Alberghi Savoia. The company entrusted the design of their project to Cesare Tenca, a prominent Milanese architect.
The site was chosen on well-reasoned grounds:
It stood in a fairly open space amidst trees
It was close to the railway station
The city centre could be reached both easily and quickly
La Scala (the world's most famous opera house and Milan's leading social attraction), where Arturo Toscanini conducted until 1928, was less than ten minutes away by carriage
Nevertheless, the proximity of Milan's industrial area was determinant in its success, as the hotel was originally intended, above all, for businessmen.
The Opening Announcement
Proof of the hotel's intended clientele can be deduced from the advertising decisions made for its opening on 6th April 1927. Although all the local newspapers carried the information, only one daily carried a full-page advertisement. This paper was Il Sole, a business publication - then as now - read for its coverage of stock market and raw material prices, wholesale and retail price trends. This decision was akin to choosing The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times to carry a hotel ad today, rather than The New York Times or The Times of London.
The text of that first ad is also revealing. Although the name of the architect, Cesare Tenca, is mentioned, significant space is dedicated to a meticulous listing of room prices, suggesting that the target customer is someone attentive to making financial decisions based on value for money. Mention of the featured 'direct dial phone in every room', is geared to the appeal of practical business calls rather than leisurely social conversations.
The ad also mentions that an orchestra was to play classical music for dinner every evening from 8 till 11 o'clock. This offering was intended to enhance the prestige and social standing of the hotel's clients, who might wish to invite guests to dinner to work out the final details of a contract nearly ready for signing.
Celebrities Among the Hotel's Guests
From the outset, the hotel's success exceeded all expectations. The first guests were international business people and power brokers. But soon, attracted by the novelty of the hotel, by the lure of a quiet stay in the midst of the trees and gardens surrounding the building, by 'all the comforts one could possibly think of' (as the opening-day advertisement promised), other guests arrived: kings, queens, international royalty and world-renowned artists and intellectuals. They quickly realised that La Scala was less than ten minutes away by carriage.
Legend also has it that among the guests of the new Milanese hotel was Italy's dashing literary icon, Gabriele d'Annunzio. And in the years both before and after World War II the Principe e Savoia registered the names of guests more associated with the world of society and letters than with business: the Duke of Windsor and Erich Maria Remarque, Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker, Evita Peron and Maria Callas. The Aga Khan and Aristotle Onassis were also regulars. Thus the fame of the hotel spread through the quality of the guests who patronised it.
In more recent times, an American magazine, well qualified in matters of tourism, commented: 'The Principe di Savoia is a kind of private club both for the aristocracy of money and for that of great names. If you want to catch a glimpse of Gianni Agnelli and his wife, Marella, together with Henry Ford and David Rockefeller, or Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolf Nureyev, the Prince of Monaco and the Visconti di Modrone all having an aperitif together, just pop into the bar at the Principe di Savoia in Milan'.
Milan in the 30s
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a difficult time for many businesses, including the S.A. Acquisto ed Esercizio Alberghi Savoia.
In 1938, the company was incorporated into the Ciga Hotels group. This signalled the start of a greater international prominence for the Principe and marked a shift in direction for Ciga, whose well-known properties included the Danieli and Gritti Palace in Venice. Such hotels catered to upmarket holidaymakers, not business people, so the decision to acquire the Principe, in the words of Paolo Guarneri, the hotel's General Manager, 'had a revolutionary air about it: the divorcing of the idea of hospitality from that of leisure, the prospect of operating in a city where the word "holiday" seemed completely out of place'.
The military and political upheaval of World War II took an even greater toll on Milan and its economy than the economic upheaval of the Depression. The Principe became a headquarters for the Germans and later for the Americans. By the time the smoke cleared in post-war Italy, Milan's geography had changed markedly. What had been the suburbs of the city was now part of the centre. Wide new streets had been laid out, and the factory chimneys of the early photo were no more. Factories had begun migrating to the suburbs and beyond. The Central train station, damaged during the war, had been rebuilt on what is its current site north of Piazza della Repubblica.
From the 50s Up To the Present Day
After 1950, the Principe, not seriously damaged by wartime events, was also renovated and enlarged. Two new wings, called Principe Rosso and Metallico, were opened between 1956 and 1957. When this renovation was complete, the management of the hotel was taken over by Ciga Hotels. They decided to rename the hotel the Principe di Savoia in the 1980s. This change was prompted by the fact that Principe di Savoia is the correct way to refer to the Italian royal family, rather than Principe e Savoia.
A change of greater underlying significance occurred in 2003 when the Dorchester Group, a company entirely controlled by The Brunei Investment Agency, took over the Principe. The new owners have embarked on a programme to ensure that Milan's leading hotel maintains its position, a commitment that will be seen in everything from interior design to remodelling of rooms and meeting areas, and a large number of suites, a sophisticated spa and gym with swimming pool, a fully equipped Business Centre, Michelin-starred chef in the restaurant and the most avant-garde technology such as Wi-Fi and interactive television. All is clothed in classic Liberty style, which evokes the hotel's original character.
Service is of course paramount, and the hotel staff come from the finest schools, receive careful training, have experience dealing with a demanding clientele and often also have experience abroad.
These high standards of service and style are appropriate to a city that is the financial, fashion, media and design capital of Italy. Milan is both the southernmost of European financial capitals and the most northern of the great Mediterranean cities. Milan is also an international centre for conferences, congresses, scientific meetings, fashion events and social happenings, events in which the hotel plays a highly visible role.
Today the Principe di Savoia continues the tradition it has culled since its founding - a place where the international elite of business and leisure meet in an atmosphere of cutting-edge class and sophisticated style.
Press Release after The Dorchester Group acquired the hotel:
The Dorchester Group, the London-based hotel property and management company wholly owned by The Brunei Investment Agency, the investment arm of the Government of Brunei, announced today that it has successfully completed the transaction to purchase the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, Italy. The Hotel has been purchased from Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. and was part of their Luxury Collection brand.
The Hotel Principe di Savoia is part of the Dorchester Collection, the successor of the Dorchester Group.
About Dorchester Collection
The Dorchester Collection is the successor to the Dorchester Group, originally established in 1996 to manage a portfolio of some of the world’s foremost luxury hotels in Europe and the USA.
The launch of Dorchester Collection in 2006 signaled a change to the strategic goals of the company. By applying its unrivalled experience and capability in owning and operating some of the world’s great individual hotels, the company’s vision is to become the ultimate hotel management company, with a passion for excellence and innovation, honouring the individuality and heritage of its iconic hotels. This will be achieved through acquisition as well as management of wholly-owned and part-owned hotels.
Backing the strategy is a strong company branding that expresses the market’s universally high regard for the current portfolio and the distinctive common values held by all Dorchester Collection hotels. The current portfolio is managed by Dorchester Collection:
The Dorchester in London
The Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills
Le Meurice in Paris
Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris
Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan
The New York Palace in New York
Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles
Opening 2010:
Coworth Park, Ascot
45 Park Lane, Londra.
Acanto restaurant
Opened in May 2006 another absolute innovation: a new veranda and restaurant entirely integrated with the inside dining room of the Galleria restaurant. Elegantly refurbished in its design, materials and colour scheme, and with a new independent entrance. The architecture of the veranda conceived by Celeste Dell’Anna Design, enhances the view to the garden, an ideal solution for pleasant dining. During the day the light comes from a transparent octagonal-shaped cupola fit to feel immersed in nature, and the atmosphere becomes magical in the evening when the garden lights up. The style will be both contemporary and refined, with walls of natural beige fabric and the use of two different kinds of woods. Lighting the room will be a series of glass chandeliers from Murano, expressly designed by Dell’Anna using as inspiration the great masters of the 1900s.
The menu is classic Italian cuisine, its flavours exalted by the talent of the Chef who combines a lightness of touch with newly gauged cooking times and presents dishes of high aesthetic value.
The primary inspiration for The Acanto menu has been the local Lombard culinary tradition, which the Chef has melded with flavours from the Mediterranean and beyond to create delicate dishes infused with a world of flavour. Nothing but the finest of fresh seasonal fare is used throughout.
The bar
“Giardino d’Inverno” is the name chosen for the bar of the Principe and the name could not have been otherwise since the bar is designed as a winter garden of the sort much in fashion at the turn of the century, a courtyard enclosed by a dome of glass, a colourful mosaic of blown glass.
Everywhere you can perceive an evident historical research: in its panels of marble, alpine green, siena yellow, Portuguese gold and Venetian red in colour, attached to the walls in frames of engraved bronze; in the handmade carpeting with Art Nouveau designs and even in the statues of white Carrara marble which stand at the sides of a fountain created on one side of the bar. The profusion of plants throughout the room enhances the garden effect and creates a sensation of freshness and of being en plein air. In these relaxing surroundings the hotel’s international clientele from the worlds of business, entertainment and culture may pass the time conversing pleasantly against a background of soft piano music.
Club 10 Fitness and Beauty Center offers gymnasium, indoor pool, Whirlpoolbath, sauna, Turkish bath and solarium.Golf tennis and squash nearby
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Principe di Savoia Country: Italy City: Milan Opening date: 1927
Note from the Host
General Manager Ezio Attilio Indiani
Coordinates
Piazza della Repubblica 17 20214
Italy, Milan
Tel: +39 02 62301
Fax: +39 02 6595838
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From the very beginning, the Hotel Principe di Savoia has been a classy contradiction in terms - symbolising gracious living for a clientele focused on business, offering the traditional hospitality of a grand resort in an unapologetically urban setting, hosting captains of industry, counts of nobility and cultural icons with equal aplomb.
In 1927, the year the Principe opened its doors as the Principe e Savoia, Milan had already begun building its reputation as Italy's business centre. So the hotel's location in what was then a nondescript plaza called Piazza Fiume, far north of what was considered the heart of Milan, was less illogical than it first appeared. Although staunch traditionalists among the Milanese believed that everything that really mattered in the city had to be located between Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Scala, the fact that the plaza - then as now - overlooked the 19th-century-style facade of the city's central railway station, Stazione Centrale, made it logistically convenient for the burgeoning business tycoons of the era. The Principe e Savoia was developed by a limited company called S.A. Acquisto ed Esercizio Alberghi Savoia. The company entrusted the design of their project to Cesare Tenca, a prominent Milanese architect. The site was chosen on well-reasoned grounds: It stood in a fairly open space amidst trees It was close to the railway station The city centre could be reached both easily and quickly La Scala (the world's most famous opera house and Milan's leading social attraction), where Arturo Toscanini conducted until 1928, was less than ten minutes away by carriage Nevertheless, the proximity of Milan's industrial area was determinant in its success, as the hotel was originally intended, above all, for businessmen.
The Opening Announcement
Proof of the hotel's intended clientele can be deduced from the advertising decisions made for its opening on 6th April 1927. Although all the local newspapers carried the information, only one daily carried a full-page advertisement. This paper was Il Sole, a business publication - then as now - read for its coverage of stock market and raw material prices, wholesale and retail price trends. This decision was akin to choosing The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times to carry a hotel ad today, rather than The New York Times or The Times of London. The text of that first ad is also revealing. Although the name of the architect, Cesare Tenca, is mentioned, significant space is dedicated to a meticulous listing of room prices, suggesting that the target customer is someone attentive to making financial decisions based on value for money. Mention of the featured 'direct dial phone in every room', is geared to the appeal of practical business calls rather than leisurely social conversations. The ad also mentions that an orchestra was to play classical music for dinner every evening from 8 till 11 o'clock. This offering was intended to enhance the prestige and social standing of the hotel's clients, who might wish to invite guests to dinner to work out the final details of a contract nearly ready for signing.
Celebrities Among the Hotel's Guests
From the outset, the hotel's success exceeded all expectations. The first guests were international business people and power brokers. But soon, attracted by the novelty of the hotel, by the lure of a quiet stay in the midst of the trees and gardens surrounding the building, by 'all the comforts one could possibly think of' (as the opening-day advertisement promised), other guests arrived: kings, queens, international royalty and world-renowned artists and intellectuals. They quickly realised that La Scala was less than ten minutes away by carriage.
Legend also has it that among the guests of the new Milanese hotel was Italy's dashing literary icon, Gabriele d'Annunzio. And in the years both before and after World War II the Principe e Savoia registered the names of guests more associated with the world of society and letters than with business: the Duke of Windsor and Erich Maria Remarque, Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker, Evita Peron and Maria Callas. The Aga Khan and Aristotle Onassis were also regulars. Thus the fame of the hotel spread through the quality of the guests who patronised it.
In more recent times, an American magazine, well qualified in matters of tourism, commented: 'The Principe di Savoia is a kind of private club both for the aristocracy of money and for that of great names. If you want to catch a glimpse of Gianni Agnelli and his wife, Marella, together with Henry Ford and David Rockefeller, or Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolf Nureyev, the Prince of Monaco and the Visconti di Modrone all having an aperitif together, just pop into the bar at the Principe di Savoia in Milan'. Milan in the 30s The Great Depression of the 1930s was a difficult time for many businesses, including the S.A. Acquisto ed Esercizio Alberghi Savoia.
In 1938, the company was incorporated into the Ciga Hotels group. This signalled the start of a greater international prominence for the Principe and marked a shift in direction for Ciga, whose well-known properties included the Danieli and Gritti Palace in Venice. Such hotels catered to upmarket holidaymakers, not business people, so the decision to acquire the Principe, in the words of Paolo Guarneri, the hotel's General Manager, 'had a revolutionary air about it: the divorcing of the idea of hospitality from that of leisure, the prospect of operating in a city where the word "holiday" seemed completely out of place'.
The military and political upheaval of World War II took an even greater toll on Milan and its economy than the economic upheaval of the Depression. The Principe became a headquarters for the Germans and later for the Americans. By the time the smoke cleared in post-war Italy, Milan's geography had changed markedly. What had been the suburbs of the city was now part of the centre. Wide new streets had been laid out, and the factory chimneys of the early photo were no more. Factories had begun migrating to the suburbs and beyond. The Central train station, damaged during the war, had been rebuilt on what is its current site north of Piazza della Repubblica. From the 50s Up To the Present Day After 1950, the Principe, not seriously damaged by wartime events, was also renovated and enlarged. Two new wings, called Principe Rosso and Metallico, were opened between 1956 and 1957. When this renovation was complete, the management of the hotel was taken over by Ciga Hotels. They decided to rename the hotel the Principe di Savoia in the 1980s. This change was prompted by the fact that Principe di Savoia is the correct way to refer to the Italian royal family, rather than Principe e Savoia.
A change of greater underlying significance occurred in 2003 when the Dorchester Group, a company entirely controlled by The Brunei Investment Agency, took over the Principe. The new owners have embarked on a programme to ensure that Milan's leading hotel maintains its position, a commitment that will be seen in everything from interior design to remodelling of rooms and meeting areas, and a large number of suites, a sophisticated spa and gym with swimming pool, a fully equipped Business Centre, Michelin-starred chef in the restaurant and the most avant-garde technology such as Wi-Fi and interactive television. All is clothed in classic Liberty style, which evokes the hotel's original character. Service is of course paramount, and the hotel staff come from the finest schools, receive careful training, have experience dealing with a demanding clientele and often also have experience abroad. These high standards of service and style are appropriate to a city that is the financial, fashion, media and design capital of Italy. Milan is both the southernmost of European financial capitals and the most northern of the great Mediterranean cities. Milan is also an international centre for conferences, congresses, scientific meetings, fashion events and social happenings, events in which the hotel plays a highly visible role. Today the Principe di Savoia continues the tradition it has culled since its founding - a place where the international elite of business and leisure meet in an atmosphere of cutting-edge class and sophisticated style.
Press Release after The Dorchester Group acquired the hotel:
The Dorchester Group, the London-based hotel property and management company wholly owned by The Brunei Investment Agency, the investment arm of the Government of Brunei, announced today that it has successfully completed the transaction to purchase the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, Italy. The Hotel has been purchased from Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. and was part of their Luxury Collection brand. The Hotel Principe di Savoia is part of the Dorchester Collection, the successor of the Dorchester Group.
About Dorchester Collection
The Dorchester Collection is the successor to the Dorchester Group, originally established in 1996 to manage a portfolio of some of the world’s foremost luxury hotels in Europe and the USA. The launch of Dorchester Collection in 2006 signaled a change to the strategic goals of the company. By applying its unrivalled experience and capability in owning and operating some of the world’s great individual hotels, the company’s vision is to become the ultimate hotel management company, with a passion for excellence and innovation, honouring the individuality and heritage of its iconic hotels. This will be achieved through acquisition as well as management of wholly-owned and part-owned hotels. Backing the strategy is a strong company branding that expresses the market’s universally high regard for the current portfolio and the distinctive common values held by all Dorchester Collection hotels. The current portfolio is managed by Dorchester Collection: The Dorchester in London The Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills Le Meurice in Paris Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan The New York Palace in New York Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles Opening 2010: Coworth Park, Ascot 45 Park Lane, Londra.
Paolo Guarneri Esq.
132 Suites