After reading the reviews for this place, my wife and I enthusiastically made this reservation as the first part of our honeymoon trip in Italy. Our experience has been absolutely horrid, and I strongly urge anyone considering this property (or host) to think again.
To explain:
(1) The area in which this building is located is unsafe. My wife and I experienced this firsthand within an hour of our arrival in the very entryway of the building. But you don't have to take our word for it. Proof of this are the many large safety notices taped to the front door of the building warning about strangers entering and the importance of maintaining locked doors, which suggests the gravity of the security situation. We were not warned about this prior to our stay.
(2) Immediately upon checking in, we met the building manager, whom the host hires to handle everything (she is an absent landlord, living out of the country it seems). This building manager's first comments to us were about my wife's appearance and what her kids will look like. When I explained how inappropriate we found this to the host, her response was (and I quote): " In my experience conversations like this is quite common in Italy, as a way of being friendly and hospitable, but I too find it out of place." Not exactly a condemnation, and far from an apology or even an explanation of why she would hire someone like that.
(3) Within an hour of our week-long stay commencing, we cancelled after a safety incident occurred in the entryway of the building. As soon as we did this, we began receiving bizarre and disturbing (voice and text) messages from that same building manager on our WhatsApp. We notified the host about this, who said she would attend to it, but the messages continued for some hours after, well into the night.
(4) Despite cancelling within two hours of our stay commencing -- and let me stress: before ever even using one drop of water or one sheet of toilet paper, let alone unpacking our bags or moving anything in the apartment -- the host refused to provide any kind of refund for our 6-night stay beyond the minimum required by Airbnb (about 30%). For this reason, I was forced to spend the first day of our honeymoon pursuing claims on Airbnb, which she vigorously rejected.
(5) Beyond this, you should be forewarned, as we were not, that this is not an easy to manage place. For instance, there is no convenient trash service (residents have to haul it to the end of the street -- where was never clearly specified -- at certain times in the early morning. The gas heating and hot water system comes with extensive instructions and safety caveats. The extremely small elevator only works if the interior doors are closed *just right* by residents in this 5-story building, and when it doesn't, you have to either make the trip up the stairs yourself or try to find the floor in which it is stuck to close the doors properly and regain the service. And these are just the things we discovered in our roughly 90 minutes there.
In short, this place proved a traumatic, costly, and singularly horrible beginning to our honeymoon trip in Italy. If you value safety, a clean (non-graffiti filled) area, a welcoming host (rather than an absentee host and a wholly inappropriate property manager), and a well-functioning and convenient building, you should probably look elsewhere.