Does Tivoli President Milano Hotel Have The Best Views In Milan?

Some hotels change ownership. Others change character altogether. Tivoli President Milano is the latter kind of transformation: what was NH Collection Milano President has re-emerged, after a serious repositioning, as the fifth hotel from Tivoli Hotels & Resorts – the Lisbon-founded, slow-living luxury brand – and its first in Milan. Find our review below.

Hotel Review: Tivoli President Milano

Location & History

The building itself has a story worth telling before you even reach the lobby. Constructed in the early 1960s and designed by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, two of the defining figures of Italian Rationalism, its bold, monumental façade – what the hotel calls Milanese Brutalism – sits on Largo Augusto, a square that began life as the city’s fruit and vegetable market.

Interior designer Rodrigo Izquierdo, formerly of Studio Patricia Urquiola, has taken that heritage as his starting point rather than something to disguise, threading a 1970s-inflected palette and black-and-white photography of Milan through the public spaces so that the building’s brutalist bones and its new, warmer interior life feel like they’re in conversation rather than competition.

That repositioning goes deeper than décor though. Where the old NH Collection was built around business travel, Tivoli has deliberately traded scale for soul: two of the hotel’s meeting rooms – Monforte and Sforza, both 40 sq/m and connectable – have replaced what were once six, with the reclaimed space redirected towards leisure and wellness instead. It’s a small structural decision that tells you everything about where this hotel wants to sit in the city.

Rooms & Utilities

Of the 239 rooms and suites, the six Duomo Suites are the ones to angle for, each offering a rare, intimate sightline straight onto the cathedral’s spires – wake up, pull back the curtain, and there it is. Grander still is the Presidential Suite, an extraordinary 150 sq m spread across the ninth floor with its own kitchen, a private gym, an infrared sauna, three bathrooms and, soon, a direct private connection to the hotel’s rooftop.

Staying there felt less like a hotel room than borrowing a very well-appointed Milanese apartment for the weekend – one with unbeatable views over the Duomo and the rooftops of the fashion district beyond. Culti Milano toiletries and a bespoke room fragrance developed with the Milanese perfumer Insium round out the sense that every detail here has been considered specifically for this address, not shipped in from a template.

Food & Drink 

Tivoli President Milano’s real ambition, though, is to become a destination in its own right, open to the city and not just its guests. The Lobby Bar hosts live music three times a week, drawing a local crowd for aperitivo rather than a strictly hotel one, and the signature restaurant soon to open on the first floor – City Milano, from the Sicilian chef and television personality Natale Giunta – promises to be the real draw.

Giunta brings his acclaimed CitySea concept north, reimagined for Milan: think premium meats, the finest seafood and elegant sushi, all served in a dining room that leans unexpectedly tropical, all lush greenery and warm, saturated tones that feel more Lisbon than Lombardy, with Sicilian flashes running through both the menu and the storytelling behind the cocktail list. Overlooking the Duomo, with DJ sets adding to the atmosphere, it’s designed to pull Milan’s own residents through the door, not just its hotel guests.

Wellness follows the same considered, slightly unusual logic. The Tivoli Wellness Club, opening soon, is a small space rather than a sprawling one, but what it lacks in scale it makes up for in ambition. Alongside a wet area and treatment room, it will offer Zerobody dry flotation and cryotherapy by Starpool, plus molecular hydrogen therapy: treatments genuinely outside the usual hotel-spa repertoire, and a world away from the standard massage-and-manicure menu. It’s a compact, charming addition, but a properly impressive one.

Largo Augusto itself is part of the pitch: five minutes from the Duomo, on the doorstep of the Quadrilatero della Moda and the Durini Design District, with San Babila metro two minutes away. Tivoli President Milano arrives, then, as both a genuinely luxurious address and a calculated bet that Milan wants somewhere less corporate, more textured, and considerably more fun than what stood here before. And on the evidence of a stay in that Presidential Suite, it’s a bet that’s paying off.

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