Hotel la Spiaggia

I attempted a booking but it didn't seem to go through. I never received a confirmation. The hotel, however, has charged me for the full amount of the booking even though I cannot use the space. If I realized that the booking went through, I would have cancelled it as the dates were not usable due to change in needs from a few days after the attempted booking.

We first stayed in Hotel La Spiaggia in Monterosso al Mare in 1981. Then the village was in a quiet corner of Italy not widely visited by tourists. The hotel’s proprietor Andreas Poggi made us incredibly welcome. During our stay there he introduced us to pesto, taught us that no self respecting Italian ordered a cappuccino after dinner and educated us on fine Italian wines. It was a memorable holiday in lots of ways and we always intended to return. This September attendance at a wedding in Tuscany provided an opportunity to make a second visit. Sadly Andreas died in 2018 but the hotel, modernised and extended,is still run by the Poggi family. However it is nonetheless categorised as a two star hotel which made us raise our eyebrows slightly at the cost of €290 per night for four nights but felt confident a special experience awaited us. We travelled by train to Monterosso from Pisa and arrived on a warm Monday afternoon. We knew the Cinque Terre had become a popular tourist destination but nothing could prepare us for the hordes of people crowding the street along the sea front and the mass of humanity covering every square meter of the pebbly and mostly privately owned beach. Our reception at Hotel Spiaggia was business like, our room small and basic. No passing cat could feel in any danger of being swung in the bathroom, the hairdryer was distinctly underpowered and although there was a fridge in the room no bottled water was provided and the glasses were tiny disposable plastic ones. We had a balcony which overlooked the garden and an apartment block. Breakfast in the hotel was disappointing. Make your own coffee, toast your own bread, squeeze your own orange juice was pretty much the order of the day. The melon was under-ripe, the pastries flabby, the bacon cooked to a frazzle. And who knew you can still buy tinned fruit cocktail? All in all a dispiriting experience. We decided to undertake the walk from Monterosso to Vernazza along a rocky mountainous path. So crowded was this that what would normally be completed in a couple of hours took three and a half. Arriving in Vernazza we found the kind of crowd scenes usually seen in Oxford Circus underground station at rush hour. The hotel receptionist gave us a map of the town which had been reproduced so often that symbols and words were virtually illegible. And this provides an appropriate metaphor for what is happening to this lovely corner of Italy. Mass tourism is wearing away the features that once made this region so distinctive. So here’s my advice if you are taking the train to the Cique Terre. Stay on board and get off at Sestri Levante-it’s a lot nicer.

Ho alloggiato presso questa struttura un fine settimana , ci hanno dato una camera famigliare vicino all’hotel , siamo stati divinamente la camera è gigante dotata di ogni confort pulitissima . La colazione presso l’hotel squisita , questo hotel anche se due stelle ha standard molto alti di certo sia esteticamente che a livello di servizi si merita una stella in più. Il personale gentilissimo sia i ragazzi della reception sia le ragazze della colazione , mi sono sentita proprio a casa . Grazie di tutto Elisa A.