ROME — A family hotel near Rome’s Termini station is betting that travellers now want evenings, not just beds. This summer Hotel Diana Roof Garden has launched a season of terrace events, from DJ sets and Lazio region food and wine tastings, through to astrology readings, built to mix its foreign guests with Romans.
Every Thursday so far in July, Balliamo sui Tetti (we dance on the rooftops) has paired dancing with aperitivos by chef Umberto Vezzoli on the L’Uliveto terrace. A Vini Carini DJ evening ran on July 14, 2026, and astrologer Massimo Giannone has read the stars at the hotel’s Astro Cocktail nights.
“Every time a new season comes around, you have to try to reinvent yourself and create something new,” said Caterina De Angelis, the hotel’s head of food and beverage and part of the third generation of the family that has run it since 1939. It’s clear that visitors to the Italian capital, like elsewhere, want the real experiences, not the postcard versions, and Hotel Diana decided to launch events aimed at bridging this authenticity gap.
Founded by Benedetto De Angelis, an entrepreneur from the central Italian region of Abruzzo who named it after a friend’s daughter, the hotel has 157 rooms and 95 percent foreign guests. “This hotel is a home, and this home is a hotel,” De Angelis told Italy Now.
Rooftop competition
Rome has filled with new terraces since the pandemic, and the Hotel Diana’s answer to this proliferation is to focus on its age and greenery. Its roof garden, relaunched by De Angelis in 2008, is 30 years old. “The competition is strong, so you have to find something that personalises you and characterises you,” she said.
April brought Teatro del Gusto (theatre of taste), a cycle of dinner events casting niche Lazio producers as guests, from guanciale (cured pork jowl) makers in Accumoli to Olio di Roma IGP, the capital’s certified olive oil.
Experience as culture
The programme continues through winter with gallery visits and themed dinners. “The common thread is creating experience, making culture, even in our small way, and giving a small message,” she said.
Food writer and broadcaster Francesca Romana Barberini says the formula matches what visitors now ask of Italy. “They are certainly looking for an authentic experience, an immersion in the culture, to live the way we live,” she said. “I think it is a very intelligent way to explain how we are made, what we like, and what our lifestyle is.”
For a hotel that has traded on feeling like a home for almost nine decades, the wager is that travellers will judge a stay less by its rooms than by who they met on the roof.
