Florence for fashionistas

Crucible of western culture, Florence is equally a provincial tourist town. Backpackers picnic on pecorino beside the Pitti Palace as leaden Tuscan skies grumble.

Crocodiles of silver perms file about the Piazza della Signoria, hearts quickening under cagoules at the marble musculature of Hercules. The Accademia and the Uffizi clang shut and into life flicker nightspots jammed with museum pieces of their own: giant grinders, gingham tablecloths and ghastly laminated menus in six languages.

Fortunately, one figure has twigged that there are other visitors - urbane, thirtysomething weekenders - who, after the obligatory ooh-aah brush with Botticelli, fancy something more sexy than spaghetti and a pensione. Step forward Leonardo Ferragamo, son of shoe designer Salvatore and Renaissance man among Florentine hoteliers.

Like Versace, Bulgari and Ferretti, Ferragamo has woken up to the lucrative diffusion option of the voguish hotel. Cornering the Florence market, the group now manages the new-classic riverfront Hotel Lungarno and Lungarno Suites, pitched somewhere between Osaka and Oslo with Norwegian teak, monsoon showers and sliding screens; the Continental (under renovation for late 2002); and the Gallery Hotel Art - the flagship fashion digs - set in a backstreet Modernist monolith behind the Ponte Vecchio.

To call Gallery Hotel Art a hotel is to dress it down somewhat. Witness the reception, or, more accurately, gallery. Here, according to Ferragamo: "It is intended, through its spaces dedicated to art, to make the hotel a dynamic engine of cultural exchange." Tall white walls about a vast taupe bench are sparely hung with almost-abstract canvases of bees - the current exhibition in a continuously shifting series open to the public. The aim is to mingle fashionable Florentine and fashionable foreigner. The result is a resounding success, to judge by the reciprocal hindward glances at cowboy boots and drumtight denim.

How comfortably can you actually stay in a hotel that's an art space that's a library (lined with titles ? la Hockney) that's a fashion restaurant (in-house Fusion Bar - go figure) that's a nightclub (Sunday night = New York Lounge)? The pair of us check in, forcing the front-deskers into a flustered conflab below a set of Burmese lacquered antiques teetering on wenge-tone towers. One composes herself, smiling smoothly: "Would you gentlemen like one key or two?" Rather E M Forster, if you remove the Donna Summery soundtrack.

It is a fact of modern life that design hotels display blemishes like a supermodel does a pimple. In the dumbwaiter of a lift we're wishing we'd packed the Mr Muscle - someone has clearly been doing the can-can.

But our room (one of 74, including two spectacular new rooftop mezzanine suites with terraces yielding panoramasof bricky cupolas, scarlet-rooftops and pneumatic Michelangelo clouds) is a shrewd use of a compact space. Ten out of ten for the hand-stitched, toffee-tone, pigskin-leather headboard, the vast, burnished, silverframed mirror and the long, long bathroom clad sumptuously in pale travertine marble. Nul points, sadly, for the low-volume TV cascading a licorice jungle of flexes. (Or is it art?) Saturday, 9am, twice we've been phoned about phantom laundry and received a visit from someone to collect it. No matter - it's a convenient wake-up call for what are the creamiest scrambled eggs. Anyway, Gallery Hotel Art is handy for the Uffizi - and the new Pucci and Roberto Cavalli shops on Via Tornabuoni. (No contest when there are outfits for Sunday's New York Lounge to be found.)

It's also a pumice stone's throw from the dusty, venerable Officina Profomo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria di Novella, without whose Amber eau de cologne elixir no selfrespecting bathroom these days can be; and it's an idle stroll from shabby chic Santo Spirito quarter, where Brunelleschi's church stands smartly shrouded in restoration wraps "grazie al contributo de Gucci".

Sunday we return around eight from the Boboli gardens to find the hotel sprouting a patient queue behind a red rope. Within, the library, gallery and Fusion restaurant have melded into a seamless Sex And The Citt? catwalk of spindly he- and she-beauties in this season's tasselled cowboy modes, posing against the bee canvases while getting stung for eighteuro G&Ts. DJ Jacopo spins throbby Manhattan sounds and serious sushi disappears down slender necks until midnight.

It would doubtless elicit abhorrence among the silver tourist perms of Florence, but as a nightclub, a gallery, even a hotel, at the end of the day - it works.

? Nick Redman flew to Pisa with British Airways (0845 7733377), Gatwick departures daily, returns from £134. Three nights at Gallery Hotel Art from £588pp B&B, including flights through Exclusive Italy (01892 619650).