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Collections of recommended hotels and B&Bs are available from our Shop page for a nominal fee. These hotels and B&Bs are in the most popular and beautiful sections of Italy, including Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, the Northern Lakes, Tuscany, Cinque Terre, Umbria, the Amalfi coast, and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, with a sprinkling of hotels in other regions. We and family members and friends have stayed at or visited most of them. We have included others based on reports from other sources whose opinions we trust. We have not discovered a single website, nor a single guidebook, that lists all the accommodations for any one location. But we have discovered many superb sites, which we have grouped into a collection, Favorite Hotel and B&B Websites, that is available for a nominal fee. Many of these sites cover the entire country while others specialize in one or more regions, such as Tuscany, or one or more cities, including Florence, Rome, and Venice. In this collection, the focus and strengths of each website are described. Before contacting a hotel or B&B, we recommend that you review our Tips for Selecting Your Ideal Room. They will help you ask the right questions to obtain accommodations with the amenities that you would like. Rome, Venice, Florence, and many smaller cities and towns are well represented in websites devoted to hotels. Italy, like many European countries, has excellent, small family-owned hotels, many with fewer than 20 rooms. Such small hotels are common even in the major cities. Often, they more closely resemble what we call B&Bs in the United States. B&Bs in Italy, sometimes known as affittacamere, generally have five or six rooms at most. Many hotel websites show the number of stars assigned to each hotel by the Italian hotel rating system. Stars are assigned according to the amenities they offer, including the number and size of public rooms, whether the hotel has an elevator, and whether each bedroom has a private bath. They are not always a reliable rating of quality. For example, they do not reflect how well the property is maintained nor do they indicate the courtesy and responsiveness of the staff. We would prefer to return to the 2-star Hotel Cimabue in Florence rather than several 3-star hotels in Florence we have visited. Many hotel web sites provide listings and brief descriptions of hotels throughout Italy while others focus on one or more regions or on a distinguishing characteristic, such as historic buildings. Municipal websites, especially those of smaller towns, can be excellent sources of hotel information. The municipal websites for such towns often have more hotels listings for each town than any of the websites devoted to hotels; we discovered that was the case for Montepuliciano. Many municipal websites are listed in our Where to Go page.
In your travels, you may discover one or more hotels that are as good or better than any that you found on a website. That can be part of the pleasure of your trip. If that happens and if you would like to share your discovery, please tell us about them! With your permission, we will add them to our list of Recommendations from Other Travelers.
Copyright 2003-2010 by Suzy Kane & Associates. All Rights Reserved |
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