Bernalda, in the province of Matera, Basilicata, about ten minutes from the Ionian coast. The palazzo was built in 1892 by the Margherita family; Francis Ford Coppola bought it in 2004 and opened it as a hotel on 1 March 2012, after what the house calls more than six years of restoration carried out with the French designer Jacques Grange. Nine rooms and suites sleep up to twenty-three. It is this register’s case of a house bought for the town around it.
The house
Agostino Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s grandfather, came from Bernalda and called it “Bernalda bella”. The palazzo his grandson bought in 2004 had been “built in 1892 in Bernalda by the Margherita family”; the house’s own history page is looser, giving only the middle of the 19th century. Coppola’s stated intention from the purchase was a small Italian boutique hotel, and the work took more than six years. The frescoed vaulted ceilings were preserved and restored, one showing Cupid and Psyche. The enclosed garden is built around a Baroque fountain and supplies the kitchen with herbs, citrus and vegetables; Sofia Coppola was married in it.
The palazzo opened on 1 March 2012 with “seven suites and two garden rooms” — nine keys sleeping up to twenty-three guests. Jacques Grange worked on the restoration with Coppola and designed some of the tiles and furniture, including the Francis Suite, which takes a North African manner as a tribute to Coppola’s Tunisian-born grandmother. Four of the nine carry family names: Suite Four is Sofia’s, which she designed herself with chevron tiles, a hammam and a terrace onto the garden; Suite Seven is Roman, Suite Eight Gia, Suite Nine Francis. The register holds the house as an operation of LHL-717, The Family Coppola Hideaways, whose press page lists six houses in all.
What distinguishes it
The town came first and the building second Almost every house in Part IV was bought for its site. This one was bought for its address: Bernalda is where Agostino Coppola, the owner’s grandfather, came from, and the owner’s stated attachment is to the phrase “Bernalda bella”. The palazzo of 1892 was the best house in that town rather than the best house Coppola could have found in Italy, and the register treats that inversion as the defining fact about it.
Six years of work for nine keys Coppola bought in 2004 and opened on 1 March 2012, after what the house records as more than six years of restoration. The output is nine rooms and suites for a maximum of twenty-three guests. The frescoed vaulted ceilings were kept and restored rather than replaced, which is the usual reason a small house takes this long.
A designer of the first rank for a house this size Jacques Grange worked on the restoration with Coppola and went beyond the scheme into the fabric: the house credits him with designing some of the tiles and the furniture, and with the Francis Suite in particular, which is done in a North African manner for Coppola’s Tunisian-born grandmother. Nine rooms is a small commission for a decorator of this standing, and the register notes it as a case of a private motive buying a public reputation.
The rooms are named for the family, and one was designed by a daughter Four of the nine carry Coppola names — Sofia, Roman, Gia and Francis — and the first three rooms are simply Garden Suite One and Garden Rooms Two and Three. Sofia Coppola designed Suite Four herself, with chevron-patterned tiles, a hammam off the bathroom and a terrace onto the garden. A house in which the proprietor’s children have rooms named after them, one of which they decorated, is not run on hotel logic.
Nine rooms, twenty-three beds, and the Volume 14 seat The dwellings page lists nine rooms and suites sleeping up to twenty-three guests between them; the Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane lists “9 luxurious rooms” and twenty-three beds, with capacity for forty at an outdoor event or wedding. The house’s site carries an Exclusive Use section for Palazzo Margherita in its navigation, and a house of twenty-three beds around one courtyard is small enough to be taken whole, which is why the register seats it in Exclusive-Use Estates rather than among the town hotels. The register could not fetch the exclusive-use terms and does not state them.
This is a house inside a working Basilicata town, not on a coast or a hill of vineyards: there is no estate around it, no vineyard of its own and no golf, and the sea is a ten-minute drive away rather than at the foot of the garden. Nine rooms means a guest is never far from the other parties, and the rooms are named after one family whose presence is the point of the place. A traveller who wants Italy at the scale of Tuscany, or anonymity, should look elsewhere in this Part.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
People anchored here
Sources
What the entry rests on, read 13 October 2026. Each reference records the facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.