We rented this apartment for a week and ended up leaving after 2 days. It looked good online with VRBO, 4 bedrooms on 2 floors overlooking canals and 3 stories up ancient stairs. Nicely located too, as we knew from staying in other apartments in Venice. But these canals are working men's canals. The motor boats are loud and operate at all hours, starting at 3 or 4 AM, and then all day into the night, honking around each bend in the canal and then revving up as they sped off! At dawn the loading docks went to work with loud clattering, deliveries and garbage pick-up
But the real problem for us was the apartment itself. It was decorated and maintained in what I would call cheap, shabby, minimal, and worn...4 bedrooms and 3 baths and most of the place smelled so bad we had to close down the kitchen and one bathroom all together, open windows and burn incense to make it possible to be there. Every piece of furniture was covered in old faded coverings and the walls were stained, in need of paint, and spotted with dead bugs. We abandoned the second floor completely. The windows up there were so in need of cleaning that they looked like some car windshields I’ve seen on bad days. The flies and mosquitos kept us up at night. My wife left the apartment with bites on her face. We finally got the internet to work for an hour, and then it went out completely. Before arriving for our week, it took 2 emails to get the owner to respond about how to get into the apartment, which she did only a week before we arrived. It took 3 emails to get any response from her about restaurants in the neighborhood. Her response was only that her rep
would give us restaurant recommendations when we arrived. When we arrived and checked in, the representative told us the name of a local pizza place she liked and gave us a common tourist map. That’s it! Anyone who knows Venice also knows you need reservations well in advance at any good restaurant, and they know pizza places are available anywhere. We emailed the owner’s rep immediately that we moved out 5 days early, and emailed the owner that we wanted to be fair to her and expected only to be reimbursed for the days we did not use. Her reply was the only time she replied to any questions we had., quick and long, defensive, insulting, and filled with misconceptions about the state of the apartment. We travel a lot, and this was the worst place we've rented, ever. I would caution anyone to not rent here.
