Italian Communist Party headquarters opens as five-star Rome hotel

Room 207 of the newly opened Thompson Rome costs about €600 a night and comes with a bottle of Valpolicella on the table. The balcony outside it, on Via delle Botteghe Oscure in central Rome, is where Enrico Berlinguer stood on election night in June 1976 to proclaim that one Italian in three had voted Communist.

The building was the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party, the largest communist party in the West. The party dissolved itself in 1991; its successor, the Democrats of the Left — the ancestor of today's Democratic Party — kept the offices until 2000, when the Italian Banking Association moved in. The building has now opened as a five-star hotel under the Spanish manager Arturo Reguero, receiving guests who, El País reports, come and go largely indifferent to the site's significance.

What survives of the old tenants survives under compulsion. Heritage authorities require the preservation of sculptor Giò Pomodoro's 1978 entrance work — a hammer and sickle embedded in the wall, together with a copy of the Paris Commune's red flag — and of the five-pointed star set into the paving. A bust of Antonio Gramsci stands at the foot of the staircase; explanatory panels fill in the rest for whoever stops to read them. Walter Veltroni, a former leader of the successor party, recently spent a day at the hotel. He told staff he could not find his way around, and left feeling very sad.

The heaviest history lies just outside. Aldo Moro's body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4 a little over a hundred metres away, at a point equidistant from Christian Democracy's headquarters. The placement was the message, El País notes: that the two parties should not seek agreement. The Red Brigades are the named culprits, or whoever was behind them; speculation over the years has added the CIA, the secret services and illegal Freemasonry.

The party's bookstore occupied the ground floor, called Rinascita — rebirth — where Carmen Llera, Alberto Moravia's wife and later widow, worked as a volunteer and was paid in books. It closed in 2009. The monthly rent was €15,000.