Rebecca

My fiance and I are spending part of our honeymoon in Florence and are looking for hotel recommendations. We want the hotel to be nice, clean, and convenient to great restaurants/city. We also want a room with private bath. We would prefer to spend under $200 (american) which I suppose means we'd like to stick to under Lit. 300.000. Please let me know if you have any recommendations. Thank you!! <BR>Rebecca

Steve the Guide

Hello. I suggest Pensione Annalena. just two steps from the Pitti Palace and the Ponte Vecchio in fron the famous gards of Boboli. See www.hotelannalena.it

Paul

Hotel Casci, on via Cavour, between the Duomo and San Marco (great location). It's a nice two star hotel, centrally located, clean, and about 100/night with breakfast. All rooms have a private bath. Others on this forum have stayed here as well, and liked it. The web site is: http://www.hotelcasci.com.

Amy

My husband and I spent our honeymoon in Europe and three nights of that in Florence. We stayed at the Hotel Lungarno which was on the river just a few feet from the Ponte Vecchio. Great location to walk to everything. It was the classiest hotel we had ever stayed in...Private terrace, heated towel racks, robes, houseshoes, the finest linens, chilled champagne, safe, fresh flowers, large marble bath with tub and bidet, excellent breakfast included and the next day's forecast on your pillow. Perfect! Worth $222 American dollars a night. Congratulations.

Portia

I'm going to tell you about a place I love, the Pensione Bencista. It's outside of Florence, in Fiesole but DON"T LET THAT PUT YOU OFF. You catch a bus outside the door (they sell them to you at the hotel and tell you what to do) and then you ride down the hill about 15 or 20 minutes into whatever of part of Florence you want to see. If your honeymoon is in th summer, you'll be happy to be out of Florence, up in the hills. Not only is it cooler, you get to sit there at sundown with a drink and look down at the beautiful city. This is as close to one of those pensions in an EM Forster novel/film (A Room with a View) I've ever seen. I got the name from Karen Brown's Country Inns in Italy book, a great book. She also has a good website, www.karenbrown.com. <BR>The Bencista is across the road from one of Italy's most expensive hotels, the Villa San Michele, and my husband and I stayed there, too (I'm a travel writer and was on assignment) but liked the Bencista better.

Erika

Holy cow, a question I can finally answer. We spent a week in Florence last September and stayed at the Hotel Loggiato dei Serviti. It's on a *very* quiet square just north of the Duomo (you will appreciate the quiet once you get there and listen to the deafening scooters). It used to be a monastery and has every sort of nook, cranny and beautiful architecture you could ever imagine. The people at the hotel are incredibly nice, they all speak English, and every weekend they have a food market on the square so you can walk right out the front door and pick up breakfast, lunch, whatever (we sat and watched a man make a copper pot while we ate our lunch on the steps, and when he finished, we bought the pot as a reminder of the place). They are at http://www.venere.it/firenze/loggiato_serviti/. I think we have pictures of it, if you are interested I can send them to you. The breakfasts were wonderful, although there were mostly Americans there We found it best to make reservations by fax. Good luck!