When the restoration team began work on Via San Francesco 19 in early 2025, they knew they were entering a building with history. What they did not know was how much of that history had survived — sealed behind plaster walls, hidden beneath centuries of renovation, preserved by the very neglect that had made the building seem unremarkable from the outside.
A Building That Has Seen Everything
The building at Via San Francesco 19 in Assisi was originally constructed in the 14th century as a convent — the Collegio Internazionale San Lorenzo da Brindisi. It stands on medieval foundations that are older still, on a street that has been continuously inhabited since the Roman era. Over the centuries it has been a place of prayer, scholarship, refuge, and community. Each era left its mark.
The Gothic arched windows on the facade date from the original construction. The cross-vaulted ceilings in several ground-floor rooms belong to the same period — extraordinary structural achievements that have stood without interruption for seven hundred years. The 17th-century fresco discovered in one of the upper rooms suggests that at some point the building hosted considerable artistic patronage. Someone cared enough to commission a serious work of art, and then it was covered over, perhaps during a later renovation, and forgotten.
What the Walls Revealed
Restoration work in a building of this age is never simply construction. It is archaeology. Every wall that is opened, every floor that is lifted, every ceiling that is cleaned requires the presence of specialists — art historians, structural engineers, conservation experts working under the authorization of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiC), which supervises all interventions on buildings of significant historical and artistic value.
Our restoration at number 19 is being conducted under this supervision. The Ministry’s inspectors have visited multiple times, guiding decisions about which elements must be preserved exactly as found, which can be restored to their original state, and which later additions can be removed to reveal what lies beneath.
What the walls have revealed so far: original stone masonry of exceptional quality, evidence of the building’s original spatial organization as a convent with communal and private spaces, and structural elements that confirm the building’s age and significance. The fresco, now being carefully cleaned by conservation specialists, depicts a religious subject consistent with the building’s convent origins. Its quality suggests it was the work of a skilled local artist from the Umbrian school.
The Challenge of Luxury in a Historic Building
The question that every restoration of this kind must answer is: how do you create a genuinely comfortable, contemporary luxury experience inside a building that is essentially a museum? The answer, in our case, is that you do not try to hide the history — you make it the experience.
Guests at Via San Francesco 19 will sleep in rooms where the original stone walls are exposed, where vaulted ceilings rise above them, where the windows that frame views of Assisi’s rooftops are the same windows that have looked out on this street for centuries. The luxury lies not in obscuring the building’s age but in honoring it — adding only what the building needs to be genuinely comfortable: heating systems concealed within the structure, lighting designed by specialists in historic interiors, bathrooms created within the available space without compromising the architectural integrity of the rooms.
Why This Matters for Travelers
There is a growing category of traveler — and we believe you may be among them — for whom the most important quality of a hotel is authenticity. Not the simulation of history, not the reproduction of antique furniture in a building constructed last year, but the genuine experience of a place that has existed for centuries and has been carefully preserved.
Via San Francesco 19 is that place. We are documenting every step of its restoration here, so that when you arrive in 2028, you will understand what you are staying in — and why it is extraordinary.
Follow the journey by subscribing to our newsletter. Founding guests — those who subscribe before opening — will have access to inaugural rates and priority booking.