LOCATION. The hotel is located in a side street of Via Roma, it's about 10 minutes to walk to Teatro Massimo und about 20-30 minutes to walk to the central station (alternatively you can take a bus of course). After the shops have closed (between 6 and 8 pm) the area gets rather quiet.
If you come back to the hotel from a day trip, there is nowhere in the neighboring streets to have a coffee, buy a bottle of water or cigarettes or get a snack. As there is no bar available in the hotel either, you are best advised to buy whatever you need for the evening before you head back.
HOTEL. The hotel is not as spacious as it looks on their website. When you walk in and up a few steps, you are in front of the reception desk but there is no reception area as such, you just walk up more steps then to get to the elevator and the rooms. The corridors are very narrow and the light is constantly off so it doesn't look very inviting.
ROOM. The room I had was large with a very high ceiling and was sort of bare, no decoration except for a picture above the bed. All the furniture was wooden and the floor was tiled. It reminded me very much of the rooms in monasteries. There was a little fridge with mini-bar, without a price list, so you might want to check the prices first. The window opened to the outside of the window of another room (s. photos) so there was not much daylight, plus you got the noise of the electrical appliances outside. The room itself had air conditioning which was very loud yet efficient.
Everything was clean, so was the bathroom - this was very small -it looked as if the shower cabin had been built in subsequently- and you actually had to manoeuvre sideways between the sink and the shower opening to get in (not suitable for larger people!). You cannot move the shower head so make sure you want to get your head wet.
There weren't the usual extras like pen & paper or toiletries, Kleenex, plastic bags etc. In fact there was only a little box with a shower cap which I used, this was never replaced with a new one, so I used it for days - also the plastic cup which served as a toothbrush beaker was never replaced with a new one -which I found a bit unusual...
RECEPTION/STAFF. As mentioned elsewhere, when you arrive they want to keep your passport for at least one night - no idea why... The staff was always well-dressed and polite but in a distant, almost robot-like way. They didn't (except for one guy) show any interest or enthusiasm. Also, they had little knowledge of public transport and opening times of sights that were a bit off the normal tourist routes.
Whilst I was still there, I already received an email asking me to write a review in TripAdvisor! It seems to me the owners do a lot to attract new guests (there are also a lot of sign posts for the hotel in the streets) yet when the guests are there, they are not really interested in them.
BREAKFAST. The breakfast area is in the basement (s. photos). The good thing is there is a coffee bar where you can get whatever coffee you want freshly made. Breakfast itself is typical Italian and sufficient but could have done with a bit more variety (same one type of bread every day).
TV/INTERNET. In the room, you can only get Italian channels on TV - even though on the website it says "They all have TV, SKY, ..."! there was no SKY available so make sure you want to check this out when you don't speak Italian and want to watch other channels.
In an area near to the reception, there is a PC with Internet access which was usually occupied - the charges are 0,05 EUR per minute.
Overall, the hotel is ok, but with a frugal and unkind cold atmosphere. I paid an average of over 90 EUR per night (every day of the week has a different price, for example a Friday night costs twice as much as a Wednesday night) and I expected more for that.