Great place but be prepared to receive an unreasonable and unfair request for damages
In a nutshell: the apartment is ok and the roof top view great. However, be prepared to take the risk of getting an unreasonable damage request based on false (and unproven) accusations if an issue arises. The host accused us to close on purpose (!!!) the watering system of the plants on the rooftop. A few plants died (we were not asked to take care of the plants because the watering system was going to take care of them and in such a big rooftop we did not realize that some of them were suffering) and the host asks us 2.000 euro for damage compensation! We are waiting for AirBnb to settle the dispute, but of course this is causing stress, loss of time, and clearly one would really like to avoid these situations.
The whole story is following below if you want to read further details.
For the first time we had a bad experience with a host. We rented the rooftop apartment for my mother in law, with the idea that our daughters (4 and 1 years old) could spend the day at the apartment with my mother in law and the baby sitter, while me and my husband were working. We were joining them at the apartment in late afternoon. We live nearby, so that was a convenient solution to let our daughters spend some time with the mother in law (who lives in another city) and have the children spend some time outdoor.
We told this to the host Mrs Elisabetta and she was fine with this arrangement. The apartment is nice, it gets very hot being at the top floor, but the air-conditioning works well. The rooftop terrace is very nice, it is huge with a nice view. So everything was fine, until the end. After we left the apartment (we could not meet the host as my husband and my mother in law had to leave early in the morning) in the afternoon I got a phone call from the husband of Mrs Elisabetta who told me that there was a problem, that some plants on the rooftop died because we switched off (on purpose) the automatic watering and they had a damage of about 2000-3000 euros. He was quite aggressive and he mentioned that we switched it off because we had a barbecue and the water was annoying us. I did not know what he was talking about as we had never seen the tap, that is hidden some were in the terrace and we had absolutely no reason for switching it off not even by mistake. He then interacted with my husband, we explained them several times that we were sorry for the plants but we did not switch off anything, but a few hours later we received a damage request for 2000 euros through AirBnb, in which Mrs Elisabetta stresses that we closed the system on purpose. We find this totally unfair and unfounded. Probably what happened is that the watering system did not work properly, or it was not strong enough, and some plants (as Mrs Elisabetta writes “only the most delicate ones”) died because of the extreme heat (temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius – above 100 F). So, our “guilt” has been that we did not notice that some of the plants were suffering, so we could not warn her on time. Then, probably they got advice from some lawyer that according to the Italian law accusing us of deliberately interfering with the watering system was the only way in which they can try to get some money from us.
I think that this is really unfair. We did not touch anything (we had no reason to do that and apparently this tap is hidden in the roof terrace, so we should have spent some time to find it). We just followed the instructions we got from Mrs Elisabetta’s husband and we even watered some plants that they asked us to take care of (Mrs Elisabetta recognized this in the Airbnb chat). Taking care of the many plants in the roof top is not guests’ responsibility, it is not in the rules of the house, and the hosts even told us not to worry about them because the watering system was going to do that. And, by the way, the hosts live in the same building a few floors below: they could have asked us to visit the apartment to check that the plants were fine and we would have been happy to let them in. Even the amount of the damage is not grounded: she mentioned that it took her a long time to grow the plants, and that 2000 euros is “her best estimate”. Mrs Elisabetta then wrote other things to try to reinforce the argument that we are horrible people: she wrote that we rented the apartment for my mother in law but that other people spent time there (but they knew that, we mentioned it before booking), or that we did not clean some tomato sauce stains from the kitchen (we paid 50 euros for the final cleaning, at the current rates in Rome, this corresponds to 5 hours of work for a professional cleaner, a lot of time to clean an apartment of about 40 square meters…). Things like this, very unfair as very unfair is the damage request. We left the apartment in good conditions as we always did (you can check the other reviews of myself as a guest). So, pay attention. Renting the apartment may be a nice experience, but it could also turn into a very bad one (even if you did not do anything wrong…).