Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Collection
Florence, Italy
★ Verified by our editors · October 2026
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The verdict
A 16th-century building on the hill north of Florence, run by the Barnabite Fathers as a boarding school from 1868, which opened as a hotel in March 2025 and won three MICHELIN Keys in 2026, in only its second selection. Auberge runs it for Analjit Singh's Leeu Collection: 83 rooms, the old chapel and theatre restored, frescoes and coffered ceilings kept, and terraced gardens with the Duomo across the rooftops. The centre is fifteen minutes away on the hotel's shuttle, and that is the bargain: the city by day, a country house at night.
Florence for people who want space, a pool and the Duomo in the window rather than a room on a street in the centre.
You want to walk out of the door into the old town: the centre is fifteen minutes by car or forty on foot.
Ask for a room facing the city; the Santa Maria del Fiore suites have terraces that look straight at the cathedral. The free shuttle runs from 9.30 am to 9.30 pm and stops at Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, a few minutes' walk from the Duomo.
The rooms
Eighty-three rooms, 34 of them suites, each laid out differently around the old building, with inlaid wood floors, marble tubs, trunk closets for unpacking properly and a personal wine cellar. At the top is the Penthouse la Quercia, about 210 m², in the Palazzo Moderno.
The setting
On Via delle Forbici, in the residential north of the city, on a hillside of olive and oak trees. The terraced Baroque gardens climb to the pool and look across the city to the Duomo and the Tuscan hills. The building keeps its chapel and its theatre, Il Teatro.
The food
La Gamella, the main restaurant, cooks regional Italian dishes with a lean towards seafood around an open kitchen. Conservatorio is a glass-enclosed garden room for the whole day, Il Bosco serves lunch by the pool, and Bar Bertelli, a bar and cigar lounge, occupies the old headmaster's office.
Getting there
Fifteen minutes by car from Santa Maria Novella station and from Florence airport. The hotel's free shuttle runs to Piazza della Santissima Annunziata from 9.30 am to 9.30 pm.
Good to know
The pool is open until 15 October and Il Bosco until 30 September; after that the hotel is a winter house, with the Aelia spa, afternoon tea in the Conservatorio and the city below. Two MICHELIN Keys in 2025, three in 2026.
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