While we ultimately enjoyed our stay at Barbara's, there were a couple of issues that took away from making the experience a great one.

Location wise, Barbara's place is fantastic. There are a number of attractions that you can feasibly walk to and it's very easy to get to and from the Rome Termini via a short bus ride. To kick it all off, it's literally a 3-5 minute walk from numerous awesome restaurants.

In terms of the issues that took a little away from our stay, the first was that we found certain aspects of the apartment were not very clean. For example, each dish that we took out of the cupboard needed to be cleaned before we could use it. Also, while we understand that this might not be relevant for many people, places that were not immediately visible were very grimy and dirty (for example, under the bed was quite nasty to be honest). We appreciate that these are not areas that many people would care to use or look at during their stay, but it does point towards the fact that the apartment was superficially cleaned.

While it's not in Barbara's control, we also experienced a very noisy night where both apartments on either side of us were having some kind of party which went on very late.

However, the one thing which took away most from the experience was the heat and the fact that the apartment wasn't really adequately equipped to deal with it during our stay. We totally acknowledge that we went during the middle of summer and that Rome is known to be very hot during the time we visited, however, the apartment had only one working mobile fan which had some slight cooling abilities (we found a second fan in the cupboards but it was unfortunately broken). We resorted to carrying the working fan up to the loft bedroom at night and pointing it directly at ourselves so that we could get to sleep. We would then carry it down again in the mornings so that we could use it while we were preparing to leave for the day or during the evening after a long day of sightseeing.

But ultimately, we did enjoy our stay in Rome and the location of the place made up for some of the other not so enjoyable aspects.