We were on a very tight budget but determined to visit Venice and, as my guy is a chef, decided to try self-catering. I found this apartment trawling through the internet and chose it for it's location, price (450 euros for one week) and very Venetian rustic decor.

It is situated about 3 minutes walk from the Guglie vaparetto stop or, if you're feeling very fit with luggage - about 15 minutes walk from Fondamente Nuovo (which would have cut down our water bus cost to 6 euro each instead of 12 to San Marco and saved us the rush-hour battle on the vaparetto!).

We were surprised at how large the apartment actually is - much bigger than we expected. The photographs we had seen on various websites were spot on - no trick photography there! The rooms were clean and had a very homely feel to them. The living room/bedroom is at the back and as the property is built around a small courtyard, it was quite dark but on the other hand this was an advantage as we were lucky to have extremely hot weather, so coming home to a cool room after a day on our feet was bliss.

The kitchen was stocked with plenty of pots, pans, cutlery, crockery and glasses and the only utensil we had to buy was a sharp knife - they did have a cooks knife but my guy needed one a it bigger and we left that there on leaving.

We didn't meet Alessandro but his wife Marina was extremely pleasant although she spoke no English - and our Italian was very limited. It was easy to communicate through miming though!

From what we saw of the Cannaregio area it is very much a "local" part of Venice, just as we had read. We did use plenty of the local food and wine shops and found all of the shopkeepers to be very helpful and friendly.

The only negative points to the apartment were that a couple of times we noticed a slight yucky smell seeming to emanate from somewhere behind or under the wardrobe - but hey, this is Venice and an old house just off the canal! The smell didn't linger for long and certainly didn't put us off. The other thing was that someone was spending the very early hours of most nights walking up and down somewhere above us! This resulted in us wriggling around in bed to trying to deafen the sound and the twin beds which had been pushed together kept parting in the middle!! We had no idea who the mystery person was and maybe a proper double bed would have helped us get back to sleep.

Despite these 2 quibbles, we liked Ca Rielo so much that we have just booked in there again for November this year! The cost has only risen to 470 euros for the week at that time. Not sure how we'll cope if the phantom sleepwalker is still about but for price, location and homeliness this is still a hard act to follow.