The elegant Hotel Laurin, with its lakefront Liberty (Art Nouveau) façade, was requisitioned by Mussolini's Italian Social Republic in 1943 to serve as the seat of its Foreign Affairs Ministry — one of the very few government functions actually located in Salò itself. The building gives the town its enduring and slightly misleading fame as the "capital" of Fascist Italy during those final war years.
Today the Laurin operates once again as a hotel and is open for drinks on its lakefront terrace. Walking past it is the most direct way to engage with Salò's uneasy 20th-century history. The Museo di Salò (housed in the Palazzo della Magnifica Patria) provides further context about the RSI period and the town's longer history as the administrative center of the Magnifica Patria under Venetian rule.