Hotel Cimabue Florence
Hotel Cimabue Florence was a nice place to spend a couple of nights near the center of town.
In 1980, when I was a young traveler with little money, I stayed at hostels. When I arrived in Florence, the hostel had no vacancy. So I ended up sleeping on the lawn in front of the train station.
This was pleasant, as I was surrounded by other young travelers who dotted the landscape like cocoons that night. Pleasant, that is, until 5:30 AM when a police officer thumped his baton on my sleeping bag.
Florence is For Lovers
Fast forwarding to April 2012, when my husband/ soulmate and I traveled to Italy making Florence a primary destination, what a delightful difference it was to have a hotel to burrow into after a gritty train ride from Milan. The Hotel Cimabue offered many amenities that were lacking on my trip to the city those long 30 years before.
Hotel Cimabue Florence was not as close to the train station as we had initially been led to believe at the website. Do not attempt to walk there from the train station with your baggage. Just take a taxi. It is a few blocks away from many dining establishments, and all the sights – the Duomo, Uffizi Gallery, Pallazio, Academie of Art where the David is kept, etc.
We asked for some restaurant recommendations. Denis, the clerk on duty, told us about Pepo’s and Zaza, both of which were located in the Central Market area. We had the opportunity to try both of them. Pepo’s required reservations so we saved the experience there for our last evening. We also tried a couple of the other places nearby including O Sole Mio which I believe served the best pizza and salad I had in Italy. There was even an accordion player who graced us with “O Sole Mio.” Then he cruised from table to table with his hand open for euros.
Nobody would go wrong eating at any of these establishments.
Hotel Amenities
Although our room at the Hotel Cimabue was modest in size, it provided us with a place to sleep and shower. We enjoyed a very nice breakfast every morning, free Internet access and even hand-wash our socks and underwear in the bathroom sink.
We stayed in a room overlooking the street. And even during May Day which is arguably the noisiest night of the year with the most revelers staying up until dawn, our room was sound-proofed. Not a crack of daylight crept into the room when we wanted to sleep.
One disconcerting thing, however, was that instead of one double mattress, our bed was comprised of two twins. We had not come to Florence to spend time in bed. So Hotel Cimabue turned out to be just the right spot for us.
The Hotel Cimabue Florence staff were always pleasant. If they did not know the answers to our questions, they performed research until they could find out what we needed to know. They turned us on to “Florence by Bike,” a bicycle shop that rented some nice quality mountain bikes. These bikes carried us around town and helped us plot out all the places we wanted to see on foot.
All in all, our stay at Hotel Cimabue Florence was a positive experience. To this day, we are still sifting through all the photographs of the most romantic city on Earth, Florence, Italy.
