Hotel Donatello

Great place to explore the city. The hotel is on the square where is the cathedral. Excellent service and very nice people. If you travel by car, get in touch with the hotel about directions to the parking. I enjoyed my visit very much and highly recommend the hotel.

The best part about staying in this hotel was that it was so central with access to the center, the big churches, cathedrals and parks. The breakfast was delicious with the best croissants I've ever tasted and great coffee! I loved the charm of this older hotel. The worst was the front desk! The man who first greated us seemed jaded and arrogant. Maybe he was weary of the long, busy tourist summer season that seemed to be unending in spite of autumn. The other guys were very friendly, but gave us poor advice. We wanted to see the lecture hall where Galileo taught and the man sent us to a totally bogus museum that was difficult to find. In general, I found them careless and lazy in trying to understand and direct us. Also, it was definitely a problem that their English and my Italian was so limited. It sounded like they understood, and they spoke clearly enough, but I realized much to my disappointment that they obviously had not understood my requests. Also, trying to follow the map he gave us was impossible. Everything was so tiny and confusing. Trying to use Google Maps was also a nightmare, because I lost service every 10 seconds and it redirected me, and so I kept going circles. Very frustrating.

The hotel Donatello is well located across from the city's Basilica di San Antonio, and about 5 minutes from the famous Prato della Valle and 10-15 from the city centre and old city (university, ghetto, daily markets, pedestrian street, etc). From the outside, the hotel looks quite elegant and I suspect that front facing rooms have a nice view. To be honest, however, everything else about the hotel was rather disappointing. Rooms are actually tired and pretty gloomy. The single rooms are extremely small, the doubles are of decent size but tend to overlook blind narrow courtyards and feel rather dark and a bit depressing with a decor that seems stuck in the 1970s. Cleanliness is variable, lighting unpleasant, and whilst beds are decent, the pillows are hard and quite uncomfortable. Breakfast is quite poor. If you come when one of the ladies taking care of the breakfast room are around, they will prepare you a decent coffee from the barista machine, however, if they are not, it is a fairly ghastly automatic machine that uses instant coffee to make "fake" espressos and cappuccino which is used instead. Juice is a strange watery thing from a machine. The best part are the nice homemade cornetti (croissants filled with jam, cream or chocolate) but apart from them, fruit, salad, bread, etc are all of poor quality and the scrambled eggs and meat are stone cold. There is a toaster which doesn't seem to work well and mediocre bread. Service in the hotel is not very friendly - reception staff ranged from reasonably cordial to barely polite and in one case, outright unpleasant. In short, the place is certainly not horrible, but equally, it doesn't seem too bothered about customers let alone interested in making them want to come back. A bit of a wasted opportunity given the nice location they fail to capitalise on.

The hotel is well situated and the bed was comfortable but the a/c had been switched off so the room got stuffy, airless and too warm making for a difficult night’s sleep. There were also mosquitoes that bit my wife and I throughout the night. The breakfast was adequate but the croissants were hard and a little stale.

Not horrible but not great. The a/c was off for the season and we were told to open the window for air. The room is above the bar so noise and of course mosquitoes were a huge problem. The room was small and its layout impossible for two people to move around in easily. We asked for a larger room and told no. However the front desk staff were very helpful with taxis and information.

The 1980’s called and want their hire back Ok folks. Listen closely. Their hotel either has the heat on the air conditioning. They only had heat while we were there and the rooms were very hot. Like you can sleep hot. So naturally you open a window. Hello mosquitoes and street noise!. It never cooled down. Horrid nights sleep. (I did ask for AC but they said no) So if you enjoy camping this place is perfect! The room was clean and the location was very good. And they don’t have showers. It’s a tub you have to squat down to shower. So I do NOT recommend staying here. Padova is very cool though.

Was nice, the staff were lovely, the room was lovely (just dated but not an issue). Good area to stay in