La Maison Du Charme Modena

Very unprofessional. We sent our card details to confirm the reservation, then the owner replied that she’d given the last room to someone else.

Charming and quirky, but there are too many stairs, 72 of them. The low beams also make it unsuitable for anyone over 5 ft 6.

Maria Luisa welcomed me warmly and made the stay really pleasant. I was in one of the two suites a month ago, and the B&B is impeccably clean and furnished with elegant period pieces that give it a refined feel. It’s only a few minutes on foot from Piazza Grande, the Military Academy, and the Enzo Ferrari Museum, very close to Modena’s historic center. I’d recommend it to anyone visiting this beautiful city.

My colleague and I paid 4-star hotel prices, €100 for the first-floor room and €95 for the attic room, but the apartment was cold. There was no heating on, just a wood-burning stove in the central area, which didn’t warm the bedrooms or bathrooms. The bathroom had no extra heat, and toiletries were sparse, with no hand soap. I travel for work and use olive oil soaps I bought in bulk in Spain. The apartment has two flights of stairs and no elevator. On departure day, in the early afternoon, the owner called and accused me of taking the soap dispenser. I told her it wasn’t there. She insisted the foreign housekeeper had seen it that morning. The way she treated it, you’d think I’d stolen some valuable "soap dispenser" signed by Giò Pomodoro. Avoid, avoid, avoid. They should change the apartment’s name, changing Cherme to the word attributed to General Pierre-Jacques-Étienne on June 18, 1815.