A Hotel Restoration to Bellow About : San Francisco’s Sheraton Palace reaches for its fabled days of the early 20th Century.

As I reached for a bath towel at San Francisco’s Sheraton Palace Hotel, I thought of Enrico Caruso.

Not because my shower songs had been particularly great, but because it was the celebrated Caruso who put Palace Hotel towels in the history books.

The rotund Italian tenor--then 33 years old--was staying at the hotel on April 18, 1906, when the Great Earthquake struck at 5:13 a.m. While other guests gathered numbly in the foyer, Caruso fled into the street, weeping hysterically, clutching an autographed photo of Teddy Roosevelt . . . and wearing only a bath towel.

Shaken and sobbing, he boarded the next train to New York City and vowed never to return to San Francisco. When asked, later on, about his West Coast adventure, he is said to have bellowed: “Give me Vesuvius!”

The original Palace Hotel, the world’s largest when it opened in 1875, survived the temblor with minor cracks--only to be destroyed that same night by raging fires that swept the city.

Its opulent successor opened in 1909, and for decades drew a glittering parade of wealthy San Franciscans--national heroes, stage stars and U.S. Presidents--including Warren G. Harding, who died while in office, in 1923, in Room 8064.

But eventually, the Palace slipped into worn-at-the-edges obscurity. In 1989, the fabled doors were closed for a massive, 27-month restoration and expansion that would cost $150 million.

It was curiosity about the results of that investment that took me back to the Palace.

From the moment my taxi arrived at the ironwork-and-gold-leaf entrance on New Montgomery Street, I sensed the excitement of something done right, a production well-rehearsed. An aura of tradition shimmers in the air as surely as the light from 100 crystal chandeliers.

Polished marble floors mirror the radiance of the Garden Court, a resplendent room that is 120 feet long, 85 feet wide, more than four stories high and topped with a translucent dome of pale amber and silvery glass. This immense skylight has some 25,000 individual panes, they claim--all of which were taken down during the restoration, cleaned and repaired.

When I first saw the Garden Court--in the 1970s--it was rather intimidating to open the heavy doors and peek inside unless you had a reservation. Now those doors have been removed, the wide archways left open, and admiring gapers--and architectural critics--are as welcome to wander in as guests in search of breakfast, lunch, dinner, cocktails or afternoon tea.

The vast room is, frankly, bewitching. Everything is gold and pale ivory: sconces, cupids, marble columns, urns, plaster swirls and flourishes, candlesticks, cartouches and an ornate wall clock high on the musicians’ balcony. The golden light is so diffuse that there seems no single source, and all of it is reflected and multiplied in a wall of mirrored French doors.

You have to sit there awhile to believe it, so I lingered over sundown cocktails, a mesmerizing scene backed by a grand piano playing, I think, Scarlatti. I returned next morning for a traditional Palace breakfast: an apple crepe with crunchy cranberries.

The Garden Court’s extravagant size and shape reminds me of Belle Epoque railroad stations in Paris--the glorious heydays of the Gare de Lyon or Gare d’Orsay, now the popular Left Bank museum of 19th- and 20th-Century French art. Georges Seurat would have room to paint his giant canvases here. There are luscious links to the opulent Casino in Monte Carlo and the Opera House in Vienna.

But grand and bright is not always my mood. One evening I dined amid the dark wood and mosaic floor tiles (discovered beneath old carpeting during the restoration) of Maxfield’s grill, which is near the hotel’s Market Street entrance. Next door is the Pied Piper Bar, a legendary San Francisco gathering place and home of a famed Maxfield Parrish mural of the Piper himself.

As befits an old-time hotel, upstairs corridors at the Palace are unusually spacious and guest room ceilings high. In the large, mirrored elevators you see faces from around the world.

The expansion discreetly added the essentials of a modern city hotel: a computerized business center, sleek conference rooms and a luxurious spa, with an enormous tiled pool spread under another long skylight.

Yet it is still the past that gives the Palace an entrenched dignity. I wandered along a 340-foot-long corridor off Market Street where tall cases hold mementos: Christmas menus from the 1890s, gold-rimmed pitchers and china spittoons, flouncy hats and parasols worn at turn-of-the-century affairs, lists of Prohibition rules, and banquet photos of Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and William Howard Taft.

There is even a recording of Enrico Caruso as the commanding Don Jose in “Carmen,” which is the role that brought him to San Francisco with the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1906. As vowed, he never returned.