Giselda Home was billed as a hotel during my booking on a third party website, but I'd consider it more of a guesthouse or shared apartment. It's run by the owners of the Giselda cafe https://www.yelp.com/biz/giselda-forno-roma, which is right downstairs.
We stayed here for about a week and mostly enjoyed our stay. It seems like this property opened up just recently, so there are still a few kinks to iron out. Since there aren't many reviews up yet, I'll provide a super detailed one.
The pros:
- The place was super clean.
- Comfortable bed! Seems to be some sort of memory foam. Not too hard, not too soft.
- Great neighborhood. Trastevere is lively, a ~30-45ish minute walk to major attractions, and close to public transportation - both the bus and the street car.
- The owner is super friendly. We ran into him in the cafe during our stay, and he loaded us up with a handful of his favorite cookies.
- The breakfast! Upon check-in, you get coupons for a drink and pasty from the cafe downstairs in the morning. Everything we tried was delicious. You also get a 10% off coupon for the cafe that you can reuse during your stay.
- There's a desk and a chair, a nice reading lamp on each side of the bed, tons of outlets, and even usb plugs on each nightstand. That's something that even luxury hotels in Europe are lacking.
The cons:
- No front desk. We called ahead to let them know our arrival time since it was later in the evening. We picked up our keys from the owner in the cafe. There was no posted check out process, so we left our keys downstairs with the cafe staff. They also seemed unsure about the checkout process - and weren't sure what (if anything) they should do, such as take photos of our passport.
- No "do not disturb" sign, so no way to opt out of the daily cleaning.
- The daily cleaning was mostly fine, but we did run out of toilet paper one day. Another day, the maid didn't leave bath towels -- only hand towels, and we weren't sure who to contact about this since we discovered it late at night, after the cafe was closed.
- The shower floor in our room leaked pretty badly, leaving a big puddle in the mornings. We didn't have an opportunity to bring this up with the owner.
- The night we checked in, we couldn't figure out how to turn on the heat. Neither could the owner (it's a new listing, and it probably hadn't gotten cold yet). He was very apologetic, and to make it up to us, brought up a pizza, some chocolates, and a bottle of wine from the cafe downstairs which was extremely generous. Someone came later in the evening and turned the heat on from the living room, and it worked fine the rest of the week.
- The wifi is very spotty and unreliable. The source is a small cell phone modem in the living room. Sometimes restarting the modem or unplugging it and plugging it back in would clear up the connection issues. Other times, we couldn't get the connection to work at all.
- The street outside is very noisy since the apartment is at a busy intersection. This means noise all day and even all night, with garbage trucks and other loud machinery going off between 1 and 3 am on several evenings. Unfortunately the windows aren't well sealed. If you're bothered by city noise, bring heavy duty earplugs.
Some other things to know, that I'd lump in the neutral category:
- It's up 3 flights of stairs, and there's no elevator. That was fine for us, but if you're older or have a lot of heavy luggage it may be problematic.
- Your room door goes into a shared area with a small kitchenette and a shared dining table. During our stay, no one used this area. If people were sitting here and talking, you could probably hear it from your room. Depending on the volume and the timing, that might be bothersome.
- The "queen" bed is actually two twin beds pushed together. If we didn't remember to push the beds back together, they would slowly separate and one of us would get stuck in the bed crease while sleeping.
- The safe is small. You can fit your passports and small valuables in it, but not a laptop.
- Only one tiny trash can in the bathroom for the whole apartment.
Overall, we enjoyed our stay here and the price was very reasonable for the excellent neighborhood. Make sure you bring earplugs! read more