Four Seasons Hotel Milano: From cloisters to luxury with character

Like a sciura, the name for the type of stylish older lady particular to the city, the Four Seasons Milan is the elegant grande dame of the city’s shopping district. It is 32 years old, but in hotel terms, established and mature. Occupying a flank of Via Gesù, a road in fact known as the “Men’s Road” because of its disproportionate number of male outfitters, the hotel is a firm fixture with the fashion set who book it out for Fashion Week twice a year, but also with business travellers and a stylish international crowd who flock in for the annual Salone del Mobile.

During my autumn visit, the lobby was packed with shoppers at the end of the day, drinking hard-earned spritzes and surrounded by big boxy bags, as well as well-dressed locals meeting friends for an aperitivo. The space was redesigned in 2021 to give it more of an open “Milanese living room” feel, with low comfy seating and oversized blowsy flower arrangements.

The building has been a sanctuary away from the busy streets of central Milan for centuries. Prior to being taken over by Four Seasons in 1993 — only the second in the group to open in Europe after London’s Park Lane, 6-8 Via Gesù had once been a 15th-century convent and then an aristocratic home. The large, tranquil cloistered garden used to be where the nuns — who were the city’s pharmacists at the time — grew their medicinal herbs. Now, medicinal negronis and sbagliatos are sunk by guests there instead, in discreet sitting areas dotted around the greenery.

RESTAURANT AND BAR

The hub of the lobby is around the glitzy semicircular bar, Stilla, busy serving flutes of biscuity Franciacorta and a variety of short Campari-based drinks — accompanied by bowls of nuts, taralli biscuits and olives, as well as hot snacks — from just after cappuccino time until the wee hours.

I had to control myself, as I didn’t want to ruin my appetite for the main event, the hotel’s excellent restaurant, Zelo, presided over by chef Fabrizio Borraccino. With its geometric distorting mirror, terrazzo mosaic floor and modern chandelier arrangement resembling a cascade of macarons, the restaurant’s look and feel is pure Milan design territory. On our visit, alongside a handful of couples who I suspected were hotel guests, was a table of 20 glamorous sciure, dressed in sparkly outfits and celebrating a landmark birthday with lots of fizz and laughter. Oh, to be of a certain age and living in Milan, I said to myself.

The menu is upscale Italian, with a raw bar offering very good ceviche, crudos and oysters before plunging into a rich selection of antipasti and primi piatti. We started with an incredible crispy charcoal-embalmed poached egg with slivers of pumpkin on a bed of braised root vegetables. followed by tiny ravioli, which when prodded, produced a silken sea of parmesan cream. After this came poached red snapper on a bed of risini di Spello (a rare white bean variety from Umbria), which, while delicately delicious, was unjustly overshadowed by the ceremonial arrival of a gigantic cotoletta alla milanese at the neighbouring table. The two male diners could not hide their glee.

I could not resist Zelo’s take on tiramisu, which arrives in a sleeve that is then removed at the table, releasing a flood of cream over the dessert. I feared it would be too much, but the sponge was firm and bitter enough to withstand the torrent.

Breakfast the next day was perhaps even more satisfying. A cornetto alla crema came with a gold-leaf flourish, and a Veneziana brioche was so weighed down by its unctuous filling it felt like a small water bomb. There was only one way to work that lot off: by climbing the steps of the Duomo, just a 10-minute walk away.

ROOMS

Our split-level ground floor Cloister suite was a playful mix of original vaulted ceilings and modern design. The bathroom and dressing room were down some twisty stairs, which resulted in a few bumps to the head in the night until we worked out the correct lighting arrangement, but gave the sense of a two-floor apartment.

Rooms on the upper floors are more classic with fewer quirks — or original features. Some have views over the acers and plum trees in the courtyard below. Others, in the adjacent building tacked on to the hotel, open inwards into a light-filled internal courtyard, an example of a typical 19th-century northern Italian arrangement that allowed for the sharing of bathrooms and kitchens at the time.

SPA

Down a grand central staircase in the lobby is the hotel’s spa, the star of which is a 14-metre pool in a dark cocoon-like space built in the convent’s vaulted basement, and below the cloister. Heated to 32C, it was too warm to summon up the courage to do laps, but perfect to float around in before a treatment or a steam. I was disappointed to note that while there were his-and-hers steam rooms, the sauna was in the men’s lair, open only to ladies if it was empty.

By Rebecca Rose © 2026 The Financial Times.

Rebecca Rose stayed as a guest of Four Seasons Milan

This article first appeared in The Financial Times.