Casa S. Francesco By Wonderful Italy

The location is great, and the staff were very friendly and welcoming. I appreciated the social enterprise, though the rooms were pretty bare-bones. I also really hated the extremely strong smell of laundry detergent.

The rooms are new and clean, but there aren’t any tables or chairs in them, only in the shared area. At night, loud music from the restaurant downstairs can be heard, and the common areas always smell like food. There’s no luggage storage room or reception, though the landlord is easy to reach on WhatsApp. For breakfast, they gave me a €5 voucher for a bar 3-4 minutes away on foot. A pastry and coffee cost €6, so I had to pay an extra euro every day.

I was left stuck in the alley for over an hour after arriving at a locked door with no instructions or phone number. I had no idea where I was supposed to stay, until someone eventually came out and let me in. The signs are very poor, and it was hard to find the right place. Later, I found the woman working there. She said she'd tried to email entry instructions the day before, then realized she didn't have my address because I'd booked through a third party. She told me this had never happened before, but after it happened to me I looked at the reviews and found it had happened before. It's terrible that they haven't changed their process to prevent it happening again. Being stranded like that was extremely stressful. The next morning, I went for breakfast during the stated hours, but they'd closed early because they had run out of food.

The breakfast staff were very sweet, especially Danny, and breakfast was included. There was also a cute pizza place downstairs that looked good, though we never got to try it. The rooms were tastefully decorated, minimalist, and nicely renovated. The hotel is very central, and for the price and location, it felt completely worth it. The beds and pillows were too soft and gave us back pain. Breakfast could have been better, since eggs were often gone even when we arrived an hour before it was meant to end. It was confusing to find the breakfast room, and two different breakfast times were listed. At night, the smoke detector's flashing light came on with movement and disturbed our sleep. We could also hear mass or choir activity from the convent wing the rooms are in, which wasn't what we expected from a hotel. There’s no parking because cars aren't allowed in this historic area, which makes renting a car tricky. We split our five-night stay between my account and my husband's, and both bookings got a $40 cleaning charge, even though no cleaner came during our stay. One of us could book a larger apartment room, but we weren't offered that option. When we asked the manager on WhatsApp, we were told every room was the same size, but we saw much larger rooms while we were there. There was no manager or representative on site, and the person on WhatsApp wasn't always responsive.