Beautiful apartment, historic street
Review Submitted: May 11, 2008
Date of Stay: February 2008
Location: In our 60’s and moderate speed walkers, during the 3 months we lived in Borgo Pinti, we found that we could walk to Santa Croce 6 minutes, Duomo, Bargello, Academia or Museo di Pietre Dure 7 minutes, Piazza della Republica or Piazza della Signoria (Palazzo Vecchio and Uffizi) 10 minutes, Ponte Vecchio or Train Station (Santa Maria Novella) 15 minutes, Palazzo Pitti 20 minutes and San Miniato al Monte or Piazzale Michelangiolo 30 minutes(requiring more time due to elevation change).
Borgo Pinti is a very historic street dating to the Etruscan period. It has a famous Perugino painting, the first iron balcony ever in Florence (second on the Palazzo Vecchio), the homes of the Renaissance architects ,the Sangallos, and almost directly across the street from the apartment, the home and workshop of the Mannerist sculptor, Giambologna. At one end of the street, an old gate to the city and the other end a cemetery with the graves of the last descendants of William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the Uffizi, opposite “Primavera”, you can also see Botticelli’s “Cestello Annunziata”, which used to hang in a convent on Borgo Pinti.
The street has many wonderful shops and restaurants making food shopping etc rather easy.
The Apartment is a spacious two bedroom, two full baths with a complete kitchen, including 4 gas burner cooktop, electric oven, microwave, dishwasher, sink and drying rack, blender, toaster etc etc. There is a clothes washer and a drying rack. There is a great room for lounging and eating. It also has air conditioning which we did not use because we were there from winter to spring and screens on the windows, very rare in Italy but important during the Florence mosquito season.
There are 3 televisions with dvd equipment and satellite service. There is a high speed dsl line which we found highly reliable, (one brief outage for a server problem in 3 months).
All of the equipment and appliances operate as they should.
Located on the second piano (which Americans consider the third floor), there are 56 steps to climb to reach the apartment.
In addition to all of this, one of the real assets of this apartment is Claudia, the owner who lives in Napoli, Serena, the manager and Martina, the person who cleans. They are immediately responsive and eager to please and wonderful, warm people.
We have lived in other apartments in Florence, but Borgo Pinti is the best that we have found.
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Helpful votes: 3/3
