Interno
A stay at Interno Marche unfolds like a slow discovery, whether you’re studying the lines of a lamp or losing yourself in the weave of a fabric. Guests move through rooms that were built more than a century ago for industrial production, live among objects that have shaped the history of design, and eat in spaces where the past and present are in constant conversation.
The history
To understand this hotel, you have to know where it came from. The story begins with the Villa Gabrielli, which for some sixty years housed the leather goods workshop Nazareno Gabrielli before becoming, in 1962, the headquarters of the Italian furniture house Poltrona Frau. In 2024, the building reopened as a hotel under the entrepreneur Franco Moschini, a familiar name in Italian design circles for having spent years steering Poltrona Frau, Cassina, Cappellini, Zanotta and Gebrüder Thonet Vienna.
It was never going to be an ordinary hotel. What has resulted is not merely handsome, it amounts to a considerable work of art. Much of the credit belongs to Studio ORA, the local architecture firm that uncovered the villa’s original frescoes, reworked the vast twentieth-century factory halls, and even preserved the old tanning vats where hides were once cured.
The hotel
Across roughly 3,600 square meters, the historic architecture sits alongside the work of some of Italy’s – and the world’s – most consequential designers. Michele De Lucchi, Gae Aulenti, Gio Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Marc Newson, Luigi Massoni and Marco Zanuso, among others, become part of an experience that spans six decades of design.
More than 400 pieces fill the building, a mix of icons and works created specifically for the project. It functions like a lived-in museum, minus the velvet rope that usually separates viewer from object. During a visit, you actually inhabit the design – the chairs are meant to be sat in, the beds meant to be slept in. It changes how you experience the objects.
Thirty Rooms, Thirty Stories
The hotel has thirty rooms in total. Twenty-five standard rooms and five long-stay suites, no two alike. Each is devoted to a single designer or design era, its language carried through furniture, materials, colors, fabrics and pattern. Walking from one room to the next feels less like changing floors than crossing into a series of self-contained worlds.
In the room dedicated to Luigi Massoni, his well-known Lullaby chair sits beneath a frescoed ceiling. The room devoted to Lazzeroni holds a Volare bed. The one tracing Marco Zanuso’s career centers on a Woodline sofa, its window looking out toward the Politeama cultural center, restored by the Fondazione Franco Moschini and designed by Michele De Lucchi.
Garden & Spa
After the visual density of the interiors, the garden offers a genuine exhale. Here the hotel opens outward, and this is also where the wellness areas begin. The mood turns quieter, more like a private house than a hotel. On the ground floor there’s a small spa with a pool, saunas and a gym – a welcome, unfussy addition for travelers arriving from farther afield.
At the table
The kitchen follows the same instinct as the rest of the hotel. The bistro restaurant serves food rooted in local tradition but alert to ideas from elsewhere, with ingredients and recipes that speak to the region through a contemporary lens, set in a room that feels true to the building’s history.
The lobby, breakfast room and lounge bar, meanwhile, occupy the great three-nave hall that once formed the beating heart of the factory – arguably the single most striking space in the hotel. The industrial architecture remains fully legible even as it becomes a place for gathering, the building’s working past folded into its everyday rhythm.
Tolentino
Interno Marche wouldn’t carry the same weight anywhere but Tolentino. The hotel’s name plays on a double meaning, the interior of the Marche region (interno delle Marche) and interior design itself, but above all it points to a town that has played an outsized role in the region’s industrial and cultural history.
Tolentino turns out to be a genuinely surprising destination. First stop should be the Museo Poltrona Frau, designed by Michele De Lucchi – close to essential viewing for understanding how deeply this town and the history of Italian design are entangled. A short walk away is the Politeama, also renewed by De Lucchi, another chapter in the town’s cultural revival funded by the Fondazione Franco Moschini. For those drawn to art’s stranger corners, there’s the Miumor – the Museo Internazionale dell’Umorismo nell’Arte, an unusual and genuinely worthwhile stop on Italy’s cultural map.
Further Afield
Tolentino also makes a natural base for exploring the Marche at its most unfiltered. In a short drive, the road climbs from town to hillside, from village to mountain, past vineyards, fields, forests and small historic centers. Urbisaglia, with its substantial Roman ruins, and San Ginesio, one of the most compelling villages in the Marche interior, are both worth the detour. More hidden still is Elcito, seemingly suspended over the landscape, where the trip takes on a different character altogether.
Beyond that lie the Monti Sibillini, with scenery dramatic enough to have generated its own folklore, and sites of quiet devotion like the Santuario di Macereto and the Basilica della Santa Casa di Loreto, reachable on a drive through open Marche countryside. And towards the coast, the Riviera del Conero offers a fitting counterpoint – sheer cliffs, small coves, clear water, and villages looking out over the Adriatic.
Combine with
Definitely worth a visit is also Filodivino Wine Resort and the newly discovered RosaCypria Lodge, both also in Le Marche nearby.
Rates
Doubles from around 185 euros per night, including breakfast.
Booking & Contacts
Interno Marche#
Viale Cesare Battisti, 15
62029 Tolentino (MC)
Italy
