The Aventine was the last of Rome's seven hills to be built on, and the villas along its ridge are still mostly houses, embassies and convents. Hotel San Anselmo has one of them and it stands on its own: apricot render, green shutters, small iron balconies flying flags over the door, a planted roof terrace, and a Roman stone pine on the square in front that is taller than the building. The address is Piazza Sant'Anselmo 2, opposite the Benedictine church and college of the same name. The hotel publishes no build date: Michelin's listing calls the villa nineteenth century, others put it in the Liberty years around 1900. The house has been a hotel since 1960, is still family-run, and is one of four in the group, three of them on this hill and one at Termini.
There are 34 rooms and no two are alike. The website sells them as Economy, Classic and Deluxe, with suites above; the hotel's own booking engine gives the floor areas, which are the numbers to book on: Economy 14 square metres, Double Budget 15, Twin and Double 16, Deluxe 20. Small, in other words, and the thing to settle before paying. The decoration is where the money went. One room is draped in black and gold around a four-poster. Another is painted floor to ceiling with grotesques in green and gold, candelabra, cameos and swags under a Greek-key cornice, a marble column at the foot of the bed. A third carries a Baudelaire poem in Italian longhand across the plaster above the headboard, signed at the bottom. Some rooms go by name rather than number: Gold, Romeo and Juliet, Poetry. Some doubles have a small balcony.
Breakfast is included: cheeses, cured meats, eggs, pastries and fruit, taken in a high gilded room, brought to the bedroom at no extra charge, or laid in warm weather in the back garden among fan palms, clipped box and citrus. There is no restaurant in the building. A small bar off the hall opens from seven in the morning until midnight, and a drink can be carried to the lounge, terrace or garden; the group keeps a dining room a few metres away at the sister hotel, still serving in 2026, though its hours are published nowhere. There is no pool and no spa, although a Shiatsu massage can be booked in the room. Parking is on site and charged by the day, there is a lift, and reception is staffed around the clock.
This suits a couple who want Rome at arm's length and would rather put the difference into dinner, and a second or third trip more than a first. The reservations are three. Rooms are individual, so the published area is a category figure and guests in one tier report everything from generous to tight, a jetted shower cabin sometimes eating the bathroom; ask which room you are getting. The two cheapest categories were sold out on every winter 2027 date checked, so the advertised entry rate is often not the rate you pay. And then the hill. The Aventine is silent after dark, which is the reason to be up here, but almost nothing is open within five minutes of the door and every dinner ends with the climb back up from Via Marmorata.
