Entries with Room tag

Cristallo Hotel

Cristallo Hotel

Offering comfortable accommodation and convenient facilities, the Cristallo Hotel Verona provides you with all of the calibre amenities to make your stay a memorable one.

Location
The Cristallo Hotel is located in the southern part of Verona, just 8 kilometres from the historical centre. In addition, the hotel is placed close to the exhibition centre and the motorway.

Rooms
The hotel boasts 91 rooms, which offer a high-standard of hospitality and different room types to satisfy all your requests, either for business, leisure or groups.

Restaurant
The onsite restaurant offers an intense pleasure starting from the breakfast, and at dinner there is always a vegetable buffet together with the a la carte menu with typical and local cuisine.

General
The hotel provides 3 well equipped meeting rooms with different capacity according to the different settings to satisfy the client’s requests.

Category: Hotels, Verona

Best Western Hotel Langhe & Monferrato

Best Western Hotel Langhe & Monferrato

Featuring an elegant decor and a warm hospitality, the Best Western Hotel Langhe and Monferrato Costigliole D’Asti welcomes you for an unforgettable vacation.

Location
The Best Western Hotel Langhe and Monferrato Costigliole D’Asti is located in the Langhe region and it provides an access to some of the local attractions like Cinzano, Cultural Park of Saint Stefano, Museum of Cantadinerie and many more.

Rooms
With comfort and convenience in mind, all the chic accommodation units in this property comes with all latest technology as well as high standard service to wage you a relaxing environment.

Restaurant
Enjoy a delicious hot breakfast in the charming breakfast room before you start on with your day’s activities. The convivial ambience of the cosy bar is saint for winding down after a hard day’s work.

General
This property features a well-equipped meeting room which is the perfect venue for any type of corporate or social event. Health conscious guests can maintain their fitness routine at the exercise room. After a tiring day of sight seeing you can take a refreshing dip at the swimming pool or pamper your senses at the on-site spa.

Category: Asti, Hotels

Ca’ Rezzonico

The eighteenth century, the period of Venice’s political senility and moral degeneration, was also the period of its last grand flourish in the visual and decorative arts, so it’s entirely appropriate that the Museo del Settecento Veneziano (The Museum of the Venetian Eighteenth Century) should be an ambivalent place. Culled from dozens of different buildings, the collection spreads through most of the enormous Ca’ Rezzonico , which the city authorities bought in 1934 specifically as a home for the museum. It’s a spectacular building and deserves to be a more favourite attraction than it is; perhaps the ambitious restoration that’s now in progress will rectify this situation, but at the moment it’s in something of a state of flux, with only the first floor open to the public. Some of the rooms on this floor have been filled out with the highlights of the second and third floors (eg the Canaletto s, the Giandomenico Tiepolo frescoes, and the Longhi portraits), which will be refurbished whenever sufficient funding can be found. This could take some time, and it’s impossible to say for certain what will be on show at any one time; the following statement more or less describes the Ca’ Rezzonico as it used to be arranged, and as it will in all likelihood be arranged when the work is finished.

The Ca’ Rezzonico is usually open: summer 10am-5pm; winter 9am-4pm; closed Fri; L12,000/6.20.

Most of the decorations and furnishings in the Ca’ Rezzonico are genuine items, and where originals weren’t acquirable the eighteenth-century ambience has been preserved by using almost indistinguishable modern reproductions. Sumptuary laws in Venice restricted the quantities of silk, brocade and tapestry that could be draped around a house, so legions of painters, stuccoists, cabinet-makers and other such applied artists were employed to fanfare the wealth of their patrons to the world. The work they produced is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but even if you find most of the museum’s contents frivolous or grotesque, the frescoes by the Tiepolo family and Pietro Longhi’s affectionate Venetian scenes should justify the entrance fee.

A man in constant demand in the primeval part of the century was the Belluno sculptor-cum-woodcarver Andrea Brustolon , much of whose output consisted of wildly elaborate pieces of furniture. A few of his pieces are displayed in the chandeliered ballroom at the top of the entrance staircase, and elsewhere on this floor there’s an entire roomful of them, including the Allegory of Strength console. Featuring Hercules underneath, two river gods holding four vases and a fifth vase held up by three black slaves in chains, this is a creation that makes you marvel at the craftsmanship and wince at the ends to which it was used.

The less fervid imaginations of Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico are introduced in room 2 (off the far right-hand corner of the ballroom) with the ceiling fresco celebrating Ludovico Rezzonico’s marriage into the hugely powerful Savorgnan family in 1758. This was quite a year for the Rezzonico clan, as it also brought the election of Carlo Rezzonico as Pope Clement XIII; the son of the man who bought the uncompleted palace and finished its construction, Carlo the pontiff was notorious both for his rampant nepotism and for his prudery – he insisted that the Vatican’s antique nude statuary be prefabricated more modest by the judicious application of fig leaves. Beyond room 4, with its array of pastels by Rosalba Carriera , you come to two other Tiepolo ceilings, enlivening the rooms overlooking the Canal Grande on apiece side of the main portego – an Allegory of Merit by Giambattista and Giandomenico, and Nobility and Virtue Triumphing lkover Perfidy , a solo effort by the father.

In the portego of the second floor are the only two canal views by Canaletto on show in public galleries in Venice. Off to the right, room 18 boasts a full suite of green and gold lacquer pieces, one of the finest surviving examples of Venetian chinoiserie, and from there you enter the room devoted to Pietro Longhi , whose scenes of life in eighteenth-century Venice – including a version of the famous Rhinoceros – have more than enough curiosity value to make up for their shortcomings in execution. Visitors at Carnevale time will recognize several of the festival’s components in the Longhi room: the beak-like volto masks, for example, and the little doughnuts called frittelle , an essential part of the Carnevale scene. Next come Francesco Guardi ’s technically more adroit scenes of high society in the parlour of San Zaccaria’s convent and the gambling rooms of the Ridotto, but you have to move until the last suite of rooms on the second floor to see the museum’s most engaging paintings – Giandomenico Tiepolo’s sequence of frescoes from the Villa Zianigo near Mestre, the Tiepolo family home. With the exception of the pieces from the villa’s chapel, which date from 1749, the frescoes were painted towards the end of the century, at a time when their satirical playfulness was going out of fashion. The New World shows a crowd turned out in its best attire to watch a Sunday peepshow; another room is devoted to the antics of Pulchinello , the ancestor of our Mr Punch; and typically good-humoured centaurs and satyrs lark around on nearby walls.

The low-ceilinged rooms of the third floor contain yet more Longhi paintings, but the main point of clambering upstairs (apart from the tremendous view crossways the rooftops) is to see the pharmacy and puppet theatre . A sequence of wood-panelled rooms full of the appropriate furniture, ceramic jars and glass bottles, the pharmacy has to be viewed through windows, rather like peering into the set of a Longhi picture. The puppets are evenhandedly unremarkable specimens, apiece about one foot high, but their very ordinariness makes their survival remarkable in itself.

From the Ca’ Rezzonico, the quickest route up to the Rialto takes you crossways the herringbone-patterned pavement of the Campiello dei Squellini, past the entrance to the main university building and over the Rio Fóscari – whereupon you’re in the San Polo section. Just to the right of the Ponte dei Fóscari, on the north side, is the central station of Venice’s fire brigade . One of the few Fascist-era constructions in Venice, it is easily recognizable by the red launches moored under the arches.

Category: Venice

Costs And Money in Venice

There is no getting round the fact that Venice is the most expensive city in Italy. If you’re on the least luxurious of expeditions – camping, travel wherever possible, cooking your own food – it would just about be doable to get by on £30/$45 a day. Assuming, though, that you share a double room in a one-star hotel, take out in the evenings, and go to a museum apiece day, your minimum will be nearly twice that amount. Even in the dead of winter there are few double rooms in Venice costing less than L120,000/¬62 – that’s £20/$35 per person, even when the exchange rate is at its most favourable, and a strict diet of coffee and croissant ( cornetto ) in the mornings, a picnic at lunchtime and pizza in the evening will statement for another £15/$23 at least. Add onto this the cost of the odd entrance fee and boat ticket, and you’ve passed the £45/$65 mark before you know it. Allowing for the occasional excursion onto the mainland and other contingencies, it’s reasonable to budget for a basic outlay of £50/$75 per mortal per day for a summer trip to Venice. However, if you want to enjoy the occasional special meal or do a bit of shopping without worrying that your money will run out before the end of your holiday, you should set aside about £40/$60 per day as your spending money, not counting accommodation costs . And don’t forget that, as ever, costs are higher for the mortal travelling alone: for single rooms, you’d be doing well to find anything for less than 75 percent of the cost of a double room.

Currency and banks

Italy is one of eleven European Union countries who have opted to join the European single currency, the euro (¬). The euro comes in coins of 1 to 50 cents, ¬1 and ¬2, and notes of ¬5 to ¬500. Prices in this guide are given both in lire and in euros. With euro having taken over completely, prices have been rounded upwards.

The lira (plural lire ), almost always short as L (though confusingly, the £-sign is occasionally used in writing), comes in banknotes of L1000, L2000, L5000, L10,000, L50,000 and L100,000, and coins for L50, L100, L200, L500 and L1000. Smaller value coins still float around and you might get given them as change.

It’s an intent to have at least some cash for when you arrive, but the most painless way of dealing with your money is probably by using credit or debit cards . In conjunction with your individualized finding number (PIN), these give you access to cash dispensers ( Bancomat in Italian). Found even in small towns, these accept all major cards, with a minimum withdrawal of L50,000/¬25.82 and a maximum of L500,000/¬258.23 per day; a small fee is charged, usually of around 1.5 percent. Cards, including Visa, American Express and Mastercard (the least widespread), can also be used in most hotels, restaurants and shops.

The other option is to carry your money in the form of travellers’ cheques , acquirable from nearly all banks, whether or not you have an account, as well as post offices and some building societies in Britain. The most widely accepted brands are American Express, followed by Visa and Thomas Cook. The usual fee for travellers’ cheque income is 1 or 2 percent and you’ll usually pay a small commission when they’re cashed – American Express doesn’t charge for cashing its own cheques.

If you run out of money, the quickest way to get money sent out is to contact your bank at home and have them wire the cash to the nearest bank. Branches and agencies of Thomas Cook, Western Union and American Express can also wire money for a fee; often their service is virtually instantaneous.

Banking hours vary slightly, but generally banks are open Monday to Friday from 8.30am to 1.20pm and from 3 to 4pm, with major branches often opening for a couple of hours on Saturday morning. American Express and Thomas Cook offices are open longer hours, and in the largest towns you’ll find exchange kiosks that stay open late, often at the train station. As a rule, though, the kiosks offer pretty bad rates – the only places where you’ll get less for your money are the exchange desks of the biggest hotels.

Category: Venice

Palazzo Ducale

The Palazzo Ducale (Mon 9am-2pm, Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 9am-7.30pm; L8000/¬4.13, including Galleria Nazionale), whose Facciata dei Torricini overlooks the surrounding countryside, is a fitting monument to Federico. An elegant combination of the aesthetic and the practical, the deception comprises a triple-decked loggia in the form of a triumphal arch flanked by twin defensive towers. In contrast, the Palazzo’s bare south side, forming one side of the long central Piazza Rinascimento, looks rather bleak, and it’s only once you get inside that you begin to understand its reputation as one of the finest buildings of the Renaissance. Whereas a tour of most palaces of this size tends to reduce the visitor to a state of crabby exhaustion, the spacious rooms of the Palazzo Ducale instil a sense of calm. Indeed, although the palazzo now houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche , only the few remaining original Urbino works justify much attention, and until you hit these it’s the building itself that makes the biggest impression.

Just inside the entrance, the Cortile d’Onore is your first real taste of what Urbino is about. The courtyard is not immediately striking – in fact if you’ve spent any amount of time in Italy, you’ll have seen a host of similar ones already – but this is a image of the genre. Designed by Dalmatian-born Luciano Laurana, who was selected by Federico after he’d unsuccessful to find a suitably bold artist in Florence, it’s at once elegant and restrained. Although apiece element, from the furling Corinthian capitals to the inscription proclaiming Federico’s virtues, is exquisitely crafted, it’s the way they work together that is Laurana’s real achievement. Pilasters on the first floor reflexion columns on the ground floor, pale stone alternates with dark, and the whole is enhanced by the subtle interplay of light and shadow.

Off the cortile is the room that housed Federico’s library , which in its day was more comprehensive than Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. He spent fourteen years and over thirty thousand ducats gathering books from all over Europe, and employed forty scribes to make illuminated copies on kidskin, which were then covered in crimson and decorated with silver. They disappeared into the vaults of the Vatican after Urbino fell to the papacy in 1631, and all that’s left of the room’s former grandeur is one of the more outrageous representations of Federico’s power – the Eagle of the Montefeltros surrounded by tongues of fire, symbolizing the artistic and spiritual gifts bestowed by Federico.

One of Italy’s first monumental staircases takes you up to the first floor. Wandering through the white airy rooms, you’ll see wooden doors inlaid with everything from gyroscopes and mandolins to armour, representing the various facets of Federico’s personality. On carved marble fireplaces, sphinxes are juxtaposed with angels and palm trees with dolphins, while ceilings are stuccoed with such symbols of Montefeltro power as ermines, eagles and exploding grenades.

A famous portrait of Federico da Montefeltro by the Spanish artist Pedro Berruguete is worth seeking out (it’s been moved about in recent years). Painted, as he always was, in profile (having lost his right eye in battle), Federico is shown as warrior, ruler, scholar and dynast; wearing an ermine-fringed gown over his armour, he sits reading a book, with his pale and delicate son, Guidobaldo, standing at his feet.

The most elaborately decorated part of the palazzo is the suite of rooms known as the Appartamento del Duca , behind the Facciata dei Torricini. Displayed here are Piero della Francesca ’s two great works: the Madonna of Senigallia , a subtly coloured, haunting depiction of foreboding in which Mary flanked by two angels offers up her child; and the more perplexing Flagellation , where at the back of a cubic room Christ is being almost casually beaten, while in the foreground, in the courtyard, stand three figures: a beautiful youth and two older men. Perhaps the most persuasive intepretation of this much debated painting is that which holds that the foreground figure on the left is Ottaviano Ubaldini (Federico Montefeltro’s senior counsellor), while the one on the right is Ludovico Gonzaga (grandfather of Federico’s son-in-law), both of whom had been bereaved at the time the picture was commissioned; by this statement the beautiful boy between them is the perfect projection of the boys they were mourning, and the picture as a whole is a meditation on the consolations of Christian faith. Also here is Raphael’s compelling portrait of a gentlewoman, La Muta .

Still in the Appartamento del Duca, no painting better embodies the notion of perfection held by Urbino’s elite than The Ideal City , long attributed to Piero but now thought to be by one of his followers. Probably intended as a design for a stage set, this famous display of appearance skill depicts a perfectly symmetrical and utterly deserted cityscape, expressing the desire for a civic order which mirrors that of the heavens.

Paolo Uccello ’s last work, the six-panelled Profanation of the Host , tells the story of a woman who sold a consecrated host to a Jewish merchant. She was hanged, and the merchant and his family were burned at the stake – the angels and devils are arguing over the custody of the woman’s soul. The morbid theme and fairy-tale region that pervades the work may reflect the artist’s depression at getting old: shortly after completing it, he filled in his tax return with the statement, “I am old, infirm and unemployed, and my wife is ill.”

It’s in the three most intimate rooms of the Duke’s apartment you come to next that you get most insight into Federico’s personality. A spiral staircase descends to two adjoining chapels, one dedicated to Apollo and the Muses, the other to the Christian God. This dualism typifies a strand of Renaissance thought in which mythology and Christianity were reconciled by positing a universe in which pagan deities were seen as aspects of the omnipotent Christian deity.

Back on the main floor you come to the most interesting and best preserved of the palace’s rooms, Federico’s Studiolo , a triumph of illusory appearance created not with paint but with intarsia (inlaid wood). Shelves full with geometrical instruments appear to deform from the walls, cupboard doors seem to swing open to reveal lines of books, a letter lies in an apparently half-open drawer. Even more remarkable are the delicately-hued landscapes of Urbino as if viewed from one of the surrounding hills, and the lifelike squirrel perching next to an equally realistic bowl of fruit. The upper half of the room is covered with 28 portraits of great men ranging from Homer and Petrarch to Solomon and St Ambrose – another example of Federico’s eclecticism.

Category: Urbino

Museo Civico

Siena

The Palazzo Pubblico (also known as Palazzo Comunale), with its 97m belltower, the Torre del Mangia, is the focus of the Campo, occupying virtually its entire south side. Its three-part windows pleased the council so much that they ordered their emulation on all other buildings on the square. The palazzo is still in use as Siena’s town hall, but its principal rooms have been converted into the Museo Civico (daily: July & Aug 10am-11pm; March-Oct 10am-7pm; Nov-Feb 10am-6.30pm; www.comune.siena.it/museocivico ) – a series of grand halls frescoed with themes integral to the secular life of the medieval city. If you have time or inclination for only one of Siena’s museums, make it this one. Admission to the Museo Civico is L12,000/¬6.20, to the Torre del Mangia L10,000/¬5.16. A joint ticket for them both is L18,000/¬9.30 or for multi-entry tickets . An audioguide for the museum, acquirable in English, costs L7000/¬3.61. At the top of the stairs, you’re directed through a disappointing five-room picture room to the Sala del Risorgimento , painted with nineteenth-century scenes of Vittorio Emanuele, first king of Italy. Across the corridor is a series of frescoed rooms, the Sala di Balìa (or dei Priori; room 10), the Anticamera del Concistoro , and the grand Sala del Concistoro . Room 13, the Vestibolo , holds a gilded bronze of the She-Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (1429), an allusion to Siena’s mythical founding. Alongside is the Anticappella , decorated between 1407 and 1414 by Taddeo di Bartolo. Behind a majestic wrought-iron screen by Jacopo della Quercia is the Cappella del Consiglio , also frescoed by di Bartolo and holding an exceptional altarpiece by Sodoma and exquisite inlaid choir-stalls.

All these are little more than a warm-up for room 16, the great Sala del Mappamondo . Taking its study from the now scarcely visible frescoed cosmology – a circular map by Lorenzetti – the room was used for several centuries as the city’s law court, and contains one of the greatest of all Italian frescoes. Simone Martini’s mythologic Maestà (Virgin in Majesty) is a painting of almost translucent colour, painted in 1315 when Martini was thirty. The richly decorative style is archetypal Sienese Gothic and Martini’s great innovation was the use of a canopy and a frieze of medallions to frame and organize the figures – lending a sense of space and hint of appearance that suggest a knowledge of Giotto’s work. The fresco on the opposite wall, the Equestrian Portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano , is a motif for medieval chivalric Siena and was, until recently, also credited to Martini. Art historians, however, have long puzzled over the anachronistic castles, which are of a much later style than the painting’s signed date of 1328. A number of historians – led by the American Gordon Moran (whom the city council accused of being a CIA agent and for a while illegal from the building) – interpret the Guidoriccio as a sixteenth-century fake, while others maintain that it is a genuine Martini overpainted by subsequent restorers. The newly revealed fresco below the portrait, of two figures in front of a castle, is meanwhile variously attributed to Martini, Duccio and Pietro Lorenzetti.

The adjacent Sala della Pace holds Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegories of Good and Bad Government , frescoes commissioned in 1338 to remind the councillors of their duties. This is one of Europe’s most important cycles of medieval secular painting, and includes the first-known panorama in Western art. The walled city shown is clearly Siena, and the paintings are full of details of medieval life; their moral theme is expressed in a complex iconography of allegorical virtues and figures. Good Government (the better-preserved half) is dominated by a throned figure representing the comune , flanked by the Virtues and with Faith, Hope and Charity buzzing about his head. To the left, Justice (with Wisdom in the air above) dispenses rewards and punishments, while below her throne Concordia advises the Republic’s councillors on their duties. Bad Government is ruled by a horned demon, while over the city flies the figure of Fear, whose scroll reads: “Because he looks for his own good in the world, he places justice beneath tyranny. So nobody walks this road without Fear: robbery thrives inside and outside the city gates.”

Some fine panel paintings by Lorenzetti’s contemporaries are displayed in the Sala dei Pilastri to one side. Take time to climb the stairs up to the rear loggia , where you can crane your neck to see the current council chambers, also frescoed. From the loggia you can see how abruptly the town ends: buildings rise to the right and left for a few hundred metres along the ridges of the Terzo di San Martino and Terzo di Città, holding a rural valley in their embrace.

Off to the left of the Palazzo Pubblico’s internal courtyard, opposite the entrance to the Museo Civico, a door gives access to the 503 steps of the Torre del Mangia (daily: July-Sept 10am-11pm; March-June & Oct 10am-7pm; Nov-Jan 10am-4pm), which gives mythologic views crossways town and countryside. The tower takes its study from its first watchman – a slothful glutton ( mangiaguadagni ) who is commemorated by a statue in the courtyard.

Category: Siena

Along Via Di Citta 

Siena

Via di Città is the main thoroughfare linking the duomo with the Campo, and is lined with shops and plenty of explorable side-alleys, as well as being fronted by some of Siena’s finest private palazzi. The Palazzo Chigi-Saracini at no. 82 is a Gothic beauty, with its curved deception and rear courtyard. Almost opposite, at Via di Città 126, is the fifteenth-century Palazzo delle Papesse , Siena’s museum of contemporary art (daily noon-7pm; L9000/¬4.65; www.comune.siena.it/papesse ). Its four airy floors house excellent temporary exhibits covering anything from structure to video art, displayed in rooms, some with nineteenth-century frescoes, that still conserve many of their original Renaissance structural and decorative features. Via di Città continues to a small piazza from where Via San Pietro leads left (south) to the fourteenth-century Palazzo Buonsignori, now the home of the Pinacoteca Nazionale (Mon 8.30am-1.30pm, Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 8am-1pm; L8000/¬4.13). The collection is a roll of honour of Sienese Gothic painting. The first rooms – two storeys up – hold a host of gilded, thirteenth-century Madonnas; in room 7-8, two tiny panels recently attributed to Sassetta – City by the Sea and Castle by a Lake – are described as the first-ever landscape paintings entirely devoid of religious purpose. Down one flight are Renaissance works by such as Sodoma, whose panel of the Deposition (room 32) and frescoes from Sant’Agostino (room 37) show his characteristic drama and delight in costume and landscape. The gallery’s topmost storey is devoted to the Collezione Spannocchi , a miscellany of Italian, German and Flemish works, including the only painting in the museum by a female artist – Bernardo Campi Painting Sofonisba’s Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, a neat little joke in which the artist excels in her portrait of Campi, but depicts his portrait of her as a flat stereotype.

South of the Pinacoteca Nazionale is the church of Sant’Agostino (mid-March to Oct regular 10.30am-1.30pm & 3-5.30pm; L3000/¬1.55; www.operaduomo.it )–>, with outstanding paintings by Perugino (a Crucifixion in the second altar of the south aisle) and Sodoma ( Adoration of the Magi in the Cappella Piccolomini). A nice achievement loops southwest along Via della Cerchia into a studentish area around the church of Santa Maria del Carmine (which contains a hermaphrodite St Michael and the Devil by Beccafumi). Via del Fosso di San Ansano, north of the Carmine square, is a country lane above terraced vineyards which leads to the Selva (Rhinoceros) contrada ’s square, from where the stepped Vicolo di San Girolamo leads up to the duomo.

Category: Siena