The hotel Donatello is well located across from the city's Basilica di San Antonio, and about 5 minutes from the famous Prato della Valle and 10-15 from the city centre and old city (university, ghetto, daily markets, pedestrian street, etc). From the outside, the hotel looks quite elegant and I suspect that front facing rooms have a nice view. To be honest, however, everything else about the hotel was rather disappointing. Rooms are actually tired and pretty gloomy. The single rooms are extremely small, the doubles are of decent size but tend to overlook blind narrow courtyards and feel rather dark and a bit depressing with a decor that seems stuck in the 1970s. Cleanliness is variable, lighting unpleasant, and whilst beds are decent, the pillows are hard and quite uncomfortable. Breakfast is quite poor. If you come when one of the ladies taking care of the breakfast room are around, they will prepare you a decent coffee from the barista machine, however, if they are not, it is a fairly ghastly automatic machine that uses instant coffee to make ”fake” espressos and cappuccino which is used instead. Juice is a strange watery thing from a machine. The best part are the nice homemade cornetti (croissants filled with jam, cream or chocolate) but apart from them, fruit, salad, bread, etc are all of poor quality and the scrambled eggs and meat are stone cold. There is a toaster which doesn't seem to work well and mediocre bread. Service in the hotel is not very friendly - reception staff ranged from reasonably cordial to barely polite and in one case, outright unpleasant. In short, the place is certainly not horrible, but equally, it doesn't seem too bothered about customers let alone interested in making them want to come back. A bit of a wasted opportunity given the nice location they fail to capitalise on.
Excellent
81 Reviews