Residence Villa Pitiana at Donnini

The food and staff are the only good parts. The website gives a very misleading impression, and there’s nowhere to walk to or any shops or attractions to see. The rooms have neither heating nor air conditioning.

We stayed a week, while lots of other guests seemed to be there for just one night. Their loss! The rooms are dressed to suit the building’s history but still have the modern necessities, and breakfast was a great buffet. It’s a lovely place to relax for the day if you don’t feel like going out, with friendly, helpful staff, a nice pool, and lovely gardens. The building and its location are beautiful, too.

I’d come back for dinner, the lobby, and the views, but I wouldn’t stay overnight here again. The staff are friendly and helpful, dinner is good, and the building and lobby are beautiful. I also enjoyed wandering the ground floor and finding its historical objects. That’s where the good parts end for me. There’s a huge gap between the lovely exterior and the hotel’s condition. The first floor still looks historic, and maybe suites there would have made our stay different, but I can only guess. On the second floor it feels like another building. Our room was old and dirty, with a dusty floor and hair the cleaners hadn’t removed during our four nights. We had a room with a good view, so I can’t imagine what the garden-view rooms are like. The room seemed built on the lowest budget 30-40 years ago on the base of a beautiful villa, and its quality felt like a one-star hotel. There were so few outlets that we had to choose between using a lamp and charging a phone. The huge headboard meant we could only use one outlet at a time, so only one of two lamps or two phones could get power. Breakfast was quite poor apart from the good variety of cakes. The garden is beautiful, though parts look abandoned. We were looking forward to a swim and got lucky with the weather, but the pool was so dirty and disgusting that we didn’t dare go in. Maybe late September is a bad time to have a pool cleaner, but I hope it was only that dirty because it was late in the season. I wish I’d read a review like this before we came.

The restaurant food is excellent, and the waiters are quick and know what they’re doing. The hotel sits on a hill with a beautiful view, and the garden is nice, though very neglected, as is the pool. It’s an old-style villa that may have been stylish a hundred years ago, around the time of its last renovation, but now it feels very worn down. The rooms are a mess: dark, dingy, shabby, and rocky. The bathroom feels like the 80s, the shower leaks, the toilet smells, and the bathtub plug won’t open. Do yourself a favor, enjoy the terrace view, have a drink, and stay somewhere else.