Finding Sant'Angelo

Castel Sant'Angelo has stood through centuries of Rome's transformation: a mausoleum, a fortress, a papal refuge, a prison. Each era left its mark. None erased what came before. It is from here that the Sant'Angelo Collection takes its name, and its founding idea: a home that endures, while continuing to evolve alongside its owners.

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It is a fitting inspiration for a city that rarely stays still. Rome does not offer a single, fixed version of itself. It reveals something different depending on the street, the season, the person walking it, and this is precisely the idea the Collection was built around: that no two encounters with a city, or a home, are ever quite the same.

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Few people understand this better than Antonio de Tommaso. As part of August's acquisitions team, he lived in Rome for fifteen years and now uses that expertise to find homes worthy of the collections. His view of the city, shaped by years of knowing it intimately rather than visiting it briefly, sits close to the same principle behind Sant'Angelo itself. "Rome is a great city," he says, "but it's a big difference if you stay there just for a holiday, or if you live there." That gap, between visiting and truly knowing a city, is exactly what the Sant'Angelo Collection was designed to close.

Rome's ability to hold many versions of itself at once is not an abstraction. It is written into the city's own geography.  Central Rome is made up of rioni, historic neighbourhoods each with its own name and character. There are twenty-two in total, and August concentrates its search on a handful in particular: Monti, the oldest, Trastevere, well known and much loved, and Prati, close to the Vatican and shaped by a very different history.

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"Monti and Prati are completely different," Antonio explains. "Prati is the newest, the last built. The planning is much more modern, with larger roads and more elegant buildings. Monti has narrower streets, cobbled, with older buildings that have stood for many centuries. Monti is more bohemian, more artistic. Prati is more elegant."

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That same range shapes what August looks for inside a home, not just its neighbourhood. For our Grand Pied-a-Terre homes we are always looking for buildings with history with features such as high ceilings, sometimes vaulted, sometimes with exposed beams, large windows, and flooring in cotto or marble. Old shutters kept rather than replaced. "It really depends where you are," Antonio says. "You can find medieval buildings in Trastevere and in Monti as well, very, very ancient. They're completely different from the Baroque, or the Umbertino style you find in Prati." A building's age, in Rome, is rarely a guess. It shows itself in the ceiling, the floor, the shape of the rooms.

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The feeling inside the home matters just as much as the architecture around it. "The first thing is, when you enter an apartment, you have to feel that you are in Rome," Antonio says. "But at the same time, it should feel calm, compared with what you see outside." It is this same balance, alive with the city, yet quietly its own, that the Sant'Angelo Collection was designed to hold.

For Antonio, the moment you begin to know Rome is not when you have seen its landmarks, but when you have found your own small rituals within it. "It's very easy," he says. "You start feeling like a local when you have your own places, when you start talking to the same people, going to the same café and knowing you've found the right one. You don't need anything more than that to feel at home."

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He still counts himself among them. "What you feel in the centre of Rome, it's not really possible to describe," he says. "You have to go there and try it yourself." Ask him what a visitor should not miss, and he does not hesitate. "The centre of Rome is already a kind of open museum, from the Trevi Fountain to the Pantheon." But it is one quieter spot he returns to. "One of my favourites is the Pincio, in Villa Borghese. From there you can see the whole city, and it's beautiful at any time of day."

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This is the rhythm the Sant'Angelo Collection is built to hold. Not a single day admired from the outside, but a life that settles in slowly: a morning that begins at your own pace, an afternoon spent walking rather than rushing between sights, an evening that ends, as so many good ones in Rome do, with a glass raised somewhere quiet.