Travel

Family Behind Italian Fashion House Turns Milan Seminary into Luxury Hotel

After a four-year restoration project, the Portrait Milano hotel opened this month, expanding the Ferragamo family's growing hospitality portfolio

By Jay Cheshes | Photography by Giulio Ghirardi for WSJ. Magazine
Dec. 27, 2022
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The historic venue for this past September's Ferragamo spring Fashion Week show is an imposing landmark that was established as the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Milan in 1564. Seminarium is still carved into a cornice above the main entrance.

The Ferragamos took over the over 200,000-square-foot building in 2018. Now, four years into a restoration project overseen by Milanese architect Michele De Lucchi, the fashion world is getting a first look at its transformation.

Behind red curtains covering the balconies and windows, work is nearing completion on a sprawling new hospitality complex.

The 73-room Portrait Milano hotel opened this month above a new public piazza and will eventually include three restaurants, two bars, almost 10,000 square feet of retail space, a gym, a spa and an underground swimming pool.

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The third outpost of Leonardo Ferragamo's more upscale Portrait Collection brand, it is the hospitality venture that most clearly flaunts its fashion connection.

After offering a first look of the building during its spring Fashion Week show, the hotel launched with guest rooms—in dark wood, brass and leather trim—that feature memorabilia from the Ferragamo archives, referencing the birth of the brand.

In 2011, a few years after launching the five-star Portrait brand with a 14-suite property in Rome, the company promoted its COO, hospitality veteran Valeriano Antonioli, to CEO, to oversee the growing hotel portfolio.

In 2014, they were close to signing on a location in Milan for a small hotel, when Antonioli lined up a tour, through acquaintances, of the seminary building. “As soon as I saw it, I called Leonardo," he said. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I think I found the right place.’”

Valeriano Antonioli joined Leonardo Ferragamo’s hospitality company in 2010.

It would take four years to convince the priests in charge to lease the space, but spacious hotel rooms, on the second and third floors of the building, have since replaced the once austere seminary rooms.

The swimming pool, excavated from the seminary’s old basement dining hall, will open just down the hall from a health spa. Shopping along the ground-floor will include boutiques from Milan-based concept store Antonia, along with the first shop from Leonardo’s 32-year-old daughter, Maria Sole Ferragamo.

Produced by Shay D. Cohen

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