Although it was only going to be for one night, we were looking forward to staying at Hotel ‘Al Porticciolo’, Fiumicino, near Rome airport. This was to be our stopover after arriving from Istanbul, before picking up our Citroen lease car the next morning. It is a family-run boutique hotel which looked full of character, with only 8 rooms, recently renovated, overlooking boats moored in the canal and seemed lovely in the internet pictures (though of course they all do). But we will never know…
Firstly, the local taxi driver had no idea where he was going (thank God for Google Maps, which we had studied beforehand… we had to tell HIM how to get there!!). Happy to be there and with big smiles on our faces, we met the man at he desk who spoke in fast Italian, saying something about ‘un problema’ and ‘tombata! tombata!’. With our limited Italian, we thought “oh darn, this sounds like Disaster #2”. He summoned the chef – we got an Italian hand gestured description of how a tradesman installing the air conditioning the day before had drilled through a water pipe, causing the room to flood with major consequences. The water had ‘fallen’ (tombata) everywhere apparently, and so we drew the short straw. After our experience in Istanbul (see earlier post) this seemed scarcely credible. But they had booked us a room in another hotel nearby and got one of their people to drop us off. The Hotel Mach 2 was completely devoid of character, smelled of smokers, and was exactly the sort of place you expect to find near airports. Shabby?? Si, molto shabby. It was adequate but we felt disappointed to have missed out on Al Porticciolo.
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