This trendy hotel, part of the large Sol Meliá chain, was located in a 37 story tower building. Its target audience were luxury oriented travelers, especially celebrities and those with a penchant for music, design and gourmet meals. It had a penthouse VIP lounge (a favorite) for Level upper floor guests, meeting space, two restaurants, nightclub, pool area, fitness center and spa. The name Me was designed to convey that Me equals you “because Me becomes you.”
One of the major reasons I decided to travel to Barcelona this spring was the possibility of flying directly and non stop from Miami to Barcelona in Iberia’s newly inaugurated luxury service with fully horizontal seats. Not sure of what to expected at the sometimes overcrowded airport in South Florida’s largest city I arrived at the Iberia counter three hours early. Check-in was speedy and I was pleased to discover I had been assigned an aisle seat as I had requested.
This striking music hall, built between 1905 and 1908 as the headquarters of the Orfeó Català, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of Catalan culture, had more than a century of history when I first attended a sold out concert there on a cool spring evening during a week long visit to Barcelona. It was love at first sight.
When I first heard the name Via Veneto I thought of the famous shopping street in Rome, Italy and wondered what kind of cuisine the restaurant served. Soon I discovered the restaurant offered a contemporary interpretation of Catalan dishes within a nostalgic setting designed during the Italian Dolce Vita era.
Named for Charles-Augustin Meurice the hotel’s history began in 1771 in Calais, where upper-class British travelers on their way to Paris would arrive after crossing the Straits of Dover. There, an enterprising regional postmaster, Meurice (1739-1820), welcomed them to French shores at his Calais coaching inn and arranging rides to Paris aboard his coach service. It was a 36-hour trip, and Meurice built a second coaching inn in Paris in 1817 to welcome the weary travelers on their arrival. The Hotel Le Meurice moved in 1835 to its present site, one of the most fashionable locales in the city, overlooking the historic Tuileries Garden.
In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria decreed the demolition of the obsolete 13 th century walls that surrounded the city of Vienna. In their place a broad boulevard, the Ringstrasse, or simply the Ring as it is now most often called, was laid out to circle the city. It was then lined with splendid public and private buildings intended to showcase the glory of the Habsburg Empire. The Ring Hotel was part of this grand urban renewal undertaking: a residential hotel that provided bachelors of the Viennese aristocracy with in-town pieds-à-terre at the very edge of the vibrant inner city. The building experienced varied fortunes through the ensuing century and a half, going from bank headquarters to just another vacant building, before being meticulously restored a few years ago to its original purpose of elegant home-away-from-home hospitality. After 13 months of extensive reconstruction, The Ring Hotel reopened in November 2007 as an intimate luxury property just a few minutes’ walk from most of the cultural and artistic treasures Vienna has to offer.
