Sorrento, Italy: Hotel de la Ville, Room 306

 To recap our last blog entry, we had a very long, wet, tiring travel day from Paris to Sorrento. When we checked into the Grand Hotel de la Ville, we were exhausted. So...for our first night ever in Italy, how was our room? We were assigned Room 306, as shown in this Fire Exit Plan diagram on the back of the door. We had paid for a Bay of Naples view room (the Deluxe Plus), so the bay would be on the south side of the diagram.

 Notice that our queen bed is basically two singles pushed together. The hotel was up-front about this on their website, so we knew this going in. Not optimal, but it was the best choice out of all the reasonably priced hotels in Sorrento. You can now begin to see why we nicknamed it Gramma's Room.

 The decor and patterns are just what we would have found in our Gramma's house. It seems that most of Southern Italy likes this style - maybe American grandmothers are big fans of Southern Italy?

 The closet was nice and had the usual: hangers, shelves, places for luggage, and a safe.

 This shot shows the nightstand and the floor tile....way too busy for our tastes, but again our Gramma would have loved it. The room was exceedingly clean.

 Opposite the bed was a desk with a flat screen TV and a minibar.

 And here is the bathroom. Clean, functional, dual sinks, and oodles of blue patterned tile. Notice the heated towel rack. Niiiice.

 We think the love of tile is pretty common in Southern Italy. Judging from website pictures, every hotel room in Sorrento is tiled throughout - no carpet at all. Maybe it has to do with the proximity to the coast? It probably makes it easier to keep musty odors at bay - we did not detect any musty smell.

 Another interesting thing about Italian hotel rooms: the tubs all had an emergency cord that could be used to summon help. This seems silly until you actually use the showers - there is something about the tubs that make them a little difficult to stand in. Maybe we've just grown accustomed to our large shower stall at home, with it's perfectly flat floor and ample room to move around.

 Though it is hard to see in the picture, the bottom is quite sloped.

 And finally, the big mystery of Europe. Why do most of the hotel rooms have these cheesy blow dryers? The hose wiggles and gets hot, making it almost impossible for my wife to style her hair properly. We are absolutely, positively, taking our own Euro-current hair dryer next time.

 A peculiarity of this particular hotel: They give you a room key that controls all the electricity in the room. In other words, no lights or anything will work until the key is inserted. Also, the front desk made it clear than, when we leave the room, we are to take the key downstairs and leave it at the front desk. I assume this does two things: (a) it ensures us wasteful Americans don't leave the TV, A/C, and every light in the room on, and (b) it tells the clerk that the room should be empty and any activity in there is probably suspect.



 And to continue with my tradition, a photo of the thermostat. We never touched it as the room stayed quite comfortable. Below that is the light switch - a much higher quality than typical American switches.

Pulling back the curtains and looking outside, one can almost make out the Bay of Naples in the darkness. The distant lights on the uppermost part of the photo would be the Herculaneum area at the base of Mount Vesuvius, with Naples somewhere towards the left of those lights.

 Stepping out onto the patio and looking right (east), this is the view. The wet street in the foreground is the one we had just trudged up with our luggage.

 Looking straight down from the patio was this house. They must just love the tall hotel across the street.

So...how did the room compare to what was shown on the website? Here is the website photo of the Deluxe Plus room. I would find only two inaccuracies at this point....the bed looks much wider than what we got (though it is still two beds pushed together), and we did NOT get the table and chairs by the sliding glass door. There wasn't even room for a table and chairs in our room! As we'll see tomorrow in the daylight, the view does look reasonably similar to what is shown here, but if we had been assigned any of the other rooms on the bay side of the building, trees would probably have blocked that view.

Would we recommend this hotel? Well, more on the rest of the hotel tomorrow, but yes we would recommend it. The staff was excellent and the room felt clean and safe. We're not in our room much anyway, so those are the important things to us.

From here, we went downstairs for the three drinks and peanuts dinner we described in our last post, then we returned to the room and crashed for the night. Goodnight, Gramma.