Hotel Center? The blurb for this hotel on many other sites is nothing but lies. Claims made in disjointed english about it being just 'steps' from the Collosseum are hilarious, provided one doesn't have to actually stay in this hotel. At present, metro station Manzoni is closed for emergency repairs. This means a trek of about 10 minutes just to get to another out of the way metro station (Vittorio Emmanuele II), that you absolutely do need to use to get in to town (just do not try to walk it, like you would be led to believe you can.) Termini, far from being 5 minutes walk away, is a good 20, and 30 if one is leaden down with baggage. This is not conducive to anything other than a pack mule experience.
What's worse is that for a newbie to Rome - which my family and I were - one cannot understate the failed multicultural experiment that the Esquiline area is. Under no circumstances stay here. The place is a haven for unsavoury characters. To list a few incidents; there were the usual drunken gangs of youths, who were vandalising the Vittorio Emmanuele metro station when we walked past them. Then there were the beggars and gypsy families rummaging through rubbish bins, the mentally ill pushing trolleys around and muttering indecipherable jibberish to themselves, people drinking on the street, those with visible venereal diseases and lesions, and there was even the ubiquitous old man and his dog that gets better care than he can afford to give to himself. What can one say, this neighbourhood could be compared to the Harlem of New York. Perhaps not quite as severe purely from a law and order perspective, but certainly traversing the dimly lit, graffiti filled, rubbish lined streets of this neighbourhood, one doesn't feel at all safe.
Indeed, one has to buzz the reception from the outside of the hotel before one is let in.
The breakfast? They call it continental, I call it stingy. In the hotel's 'breakfast room', maintained by dishevelled cleaning staff that are clearly bussed in from an agency, there are 2 drinks machines. One dispenses 'orange juice' and 'pineapple juice'. However, it really is the luck of the draw which one you get, as they seem to pay no heed to the labels on the front of the machine. I got a glass of pineapple juice that was utterly repulsive, that went down about as well as gut rot. Both juices (when I eventually got orange juice) were watered down heavily, and that's probably just as well, as the concentrated juice could probably induce real gut rot.
The other machine dispenses equally vile coffee, tea and as a real treat - tea with milk. To eat? Plastic packets containing some sort of sweetbread, and hard, even (dare I say it!) stale bread rolls.
None of the trappings of a usual continental breakfast. Absolutely none. Nothing cooked, no cereals, no toast, no yoghurts, no fruit, no cold meat, nothing. To their credit, they really did splurge by providing two varieties of jam with which to stain your stale bread roll. How dare these people call the breakfast 'continental'? It's a blatant lie.
Then we come to the staff. The blurb informs us that the excellent, english speaking staff, are ready to provide advice on sight seeing and restaurants in the vicinity. Trouble is, that with English as poor as these staff had, the best we managed were confusion filled exchanges. Following a wearying trip in from the airport, around 10 o'clock at night, after hauling our bags down Via Giolitti, we were greeted by a man of not many teeth, nor many years left to live, who was bemused when we asked him, quite specifically, about local steakhouses. Then, he had a Eureka moment, and remembered to reccomend a restaurant that I can only presume is linked to the hotel from the name - Restaurant Center . We had the good sense to not follow his incoherent directions, and instead decided to brave the McDonalds that night. If the breakfast matched the dinner in any way, then I can say we were better off.
The rooms. Oh yes. The rooms. Fair play, they are clean, and the marble finish perhaps doesn't make the adjective 'Spartan' the most apt one, but I'm going to use it anyway. The sattelite television did not work, the minifridge was not stocked (that is not the impression that is given in any blurb), in the bathroom, instead of the usual soap and shampoo bottles there were the stingiest offerings of detergent I have ever seen - literally condiment sachets of Shampoo. Three of them. You'd use about 2 just washing your hair. They were not replaced until the third day of our stay. The towels? Don't expect anything downy, these are strictly efficient sheets of linen designed to soak up water. Then there is the air conditioning. Firstly, it is noisy, but secondly one has to contact reception to turn it on and off. There is absolutely no need for centrally controlled air conditioning in this day and age, and is more of a disgrace seeing that this hotel was renovated in 2004.
Then there was the noise. No, not any kind of noise from street level. A much more insidious one. A low 'click click click' from behind the headboard of the bed. Intermittent, unpredictable, and like some Greek vision of hell, this repetitous sound made sleep impossible. Only by going without sleep for one night, and then tiring myself out utterly in Rome for the day, did I eventually nod off on the second day of my visit. No such luck on the third night of my stay. Guess I just hadn't gone without enough sleep. We complained, and all the staff did was to promise to get maintenence to look at it in the morning. Clearly they never did, as the clicking persisted. My advice is to try and get a room in the older east wing of the property, where there are no headboards on the beds. (My father's room was in the east wing, and he slept soundly, though, he would sleep through a war.)
In Hotel Center 3, one can only get to rooms in the west wing of the property by using a cramped lift. This lift can carry just 3 people, and is unresponsive to calls most of the time, meaning that getting down to reception in the morning can take the best part of 5 minutes, as there is no stairwell access (save for the emergency exit that leads down to the street outside). What's worse, is that the lift actually stuck on our way up to our room once. A claustrophobe's worst nightmare, or indeed, anyone who is terrified of being trapped in a lift, would be well advised to give this hotel a miss.
This hotel was well below the three start standard that my family and I paid for, in a terrible part of town, and unfortunately we just did not do our research. There are 2 star pensione and youth hostels in the areas adjoining to the Spanish Steps and the Vatican that are miles ahead of this dump. Location, Location Location - let that be your watch word.
