This was hopefully a one-time experience for us and airbnb. We had been to other accommodations before this one and knew what to expect, but this was beyond any imaginations. Heads up first, we have all the correspondence between us and the host as well as the pictures from the time we arrived for check in.
After a long trip and a beautiful apartment in Lecce we arrived to Emilia’s ‘modern and stylish’ apartment, thinking we’d be about to have a nice time in Pigneto, where we would enjoy our stay without any big problems. We were told to get in touch with Philipo, who was supposed to let us into the apartment, and who takes care of it, because Emilia is not in Rome, and so we did. Surprisingly, we didn’t get any answer. When we arrived in front of the building, a lady approaches us and says she is going to let us in the apartment. At the time we didn’t think much about it. Very quickly after letting us in she was gone, hardly giving us any information really. As we were about to unpack our groceries we had just bought in the market, we started noticing how unbelievably dirty the kitchen was. We opened the refrigerator, and were additionally blown away: stains everywhere you look, old groceries gone bad, the oven full of grease, baking sheet in the oven covered in crumbs. All the excitement of coming to Rome turned into a nightmare. We were disgusted. Our only thought was to somehow create a clean spot to put our things at. So we immediately went to Lidl and bought disinfectant, plastic utensils, plastic glasses and plates. We returned to the apartment and started cleaning. Parallel to that we are writing to Emilia, sending her pictures, and at first she seemed to be surprised. She was asking where Philipo was, why we hadn’t contacted him. We explained to her that he had not answered our messages. At this moment we were not able to hide our frustration any more. We were demanding from Emilia to sort this situation out. To our surprise, her answer was that if we preferred we could leave the next morning, and that she had other problems at the moment, we shouldn’t be upset. We couldn’t believe our eyes what we were reading. We booked this apartment weeks ahead, and for us it wasn’t an option to search for another place to stay. That meant we had to make the best out of it. So the first night in Rome we spent cleaning the kitchen, lost all of our appetite while doing it, and called it a day without eating anything. It demanded an effort to get excited again about the fact that we were in Rome, this first night left a bitter taste to our stay in this city.
Philipo came the next morning and offered to clean the place, which we accepted under the condition that he buys a few new utensils, because the ones present in the kitchen were disgustingly unusable. The cleaning was done in less than an hour, and you can imagine what could have been done in this short time. He was very friendly and wrote us messages asking if we needed anything, but to be honest, inspite of his effort, the apartment was far away from acceptably clean.