This apartment was absolutely stunning. It’s been beautifully remodeled, with great stone- and woodwork features, tasteful halogen spot lighting, some interesting art, very nicely furnished, and well equipped with all of the kitchen tools or appliances one might need. Full sized washing machine (rare for Italy!). It’s also enormous, the living room alone is larger than many apartments in Rome, and it has a beautiful master bedroom with ensuite, two other full bathrooms, two other bedrooms, and a really striking, large loft space looking out onto an internal terrace. Thoughtfully, the loft has black-out curtains and a shade for the skylight so that it can be used for additional sleeping (there’s also a single bed on the sofa there). The outdoor terrace would be really pleasant in warmer weather, although we didn't use it, being there during a cold snap in December. The hosts set us up with milk, coffee, water and a welcome bottle of sparkling wine, which was a nice touch, and were very responsive to e-mails and texts, despite the fact that we were renting over the big Winter holiday period. (The last week of December.) The heat worked wonderfully, although it was a bit tricky to regulate, the thermostat does nothing, as far as I could tell, so the only way to regulate the heat is to switch it to the timer, and then play around with the settings for turning it on and off so that you end up with a overall temperature you’re shooting for. We primarily chose this place because it’s located right in the center of our favorite neighborhood in Rome (we lived nearby for 6 months while on sabbatical some years ago, and have family in the suburbs outside Rome), the area around Santa Maria della Pace. Although it’s just west of Piazza Navona, and thus has its fair share of tourists, it’s also a very dense, lively hub of great locals’ bars, restaurants and cafes. It’s incredibly central to everything, there are very few neighborhoods of interest to visitors that aren’t within a 10-15 minutes walk. You could spend hours (and we did) just wandering the streets right around the apartment, it’s probably the most beautiful and engaging urban neighborhood that I know. The main negative is a flip-side of the positive. The master bedroom, which is just off the living room, looks out onto Viccolo delle Vache (the little alleyway of the cows!), a few paces up from where it expands into a small piazza that hosts no fewer than 4-5 bars, including the very big and popular Bar Fico. (One of my favorite Roman bars, by the way.) This is the epicenter of cool locals’ drinking in all of Centro Storico, and is packed pretty much every night from 10-11 p.m. until almost 3 a.m., with people in the streets drinking, smoking, talking at usual Italian volume levels, etc. We were in town with some children who get up early, so this was a bit of a hassle...