Our tour starts at the Ristorante I Carracci, an 18^th-century salon with ceiling frescoes by the Carracci brothers’ Bologna School. Here, among elegant furnishings appointed with minute attention to detail, they serve the finest dishes of Emilia-Romagna, revisited by the Chef, as well as national and international fare. And don’t forget that the region boasts an interesting wine tradition, too. Go down into the Enoteca Morandi, dedicated to the great 20th-century Bolognese painter, and you can admire and, above all uncork,  a select range of Italian and overseas labels. The wines are paired with ad hoc menus, specially designed to create a perfect marriage of flavours. Back on the ground floor, atmosphere and epoch change at the art-deco Cafè Marinetti with its designer armchairs and sofas, coloured Carrara marble floors and a winter garden decorated with trompe l’oeil paintings. The café is named after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurismo, a regular guest at the hotel, known in his day as the Baglioni. It was he who organised a celebrated exhibition-cum-blitz in 1914 in the very basement in which the Enoteca is now housed.

There are dishes and recipes that achieve symbol status: those served at the Majestic, a hotel knows how to express itself through flavour, are certainly among them. All credit goes to our chef, whose menu is a homage to the most authentic products of Emilia-Romagna, a region that boasts an abundance of PDO (Protected Designations of Origin) foods, DOC (Denomination of Controlled Origin) wines and the excellences of small producers. It was the Chef who added Filetto alla Rossini, a dish much loved by international tourists and the Bolognesi alike, to our menu. The recipe was the brainchild of the composer Gioachino Rossini, who – as everyone knows – was a very keen chef himself. It takes a certain degree of experience to prepare the dish. Prime fillet of Italian beef – from the Piedmontese or Romagnola cattle breeds – is browned in clarified butter, then served rare, topped with a hot foie gras scallop: both the meat and the foie gras are sprinkled with a special sauce of jus and Madeira, garnished with generous shavings of black truffle, and served on a bed of buttered spinach with raisins and pine kernels, all on top of a crouton. Back at the Cafè Marinetti, the signature drink, the cocktail Roberta is a tribute to Pietro Cuccoli, the hotel’s barman from 1933 to 1975. The cocktail is a blend of vodka, dry vermouth, cherry brandy and maraschino finished off with drops of crème de banane and bitters. In 1963 the creation won the award for best “pre-dinner” drink at the International Cocktail Competition-Saint Vincent, routing the competition of 190 barmen from all over the world.