Caterina - Taormina, Italy 

We loved this hotel. Just like it looks on the website. Breakfast in the lovely garden, Reception gentleman SO kind. Lovely sun area to lie in, lovely little beach just down a path from the hotel. Cable car into town a short walk away and runs every 15 minutes. Costs 6E each return. The beach, supermarket and some restaurants near the hotel. Taormina is a VERY VERY EXPENSIVE TOWN. Top tip if you are backpacking like we were.... Walk through town as far as you can get, to a public square with a huge fountain. Turn down an alleyway off the left corner of the square to a takeaway - the likes of which you have never seen before. FANTASTIC. Bought 4 pieces of yummy pitza and two bottles of beer for 11E. Then did what everyone else was doing - sat on fountain to eat them and watched the world walk past. Taxi to train station 12E. Takes 5 - 10 minutes. Car park in the hotel. Taormina is my favourite place on earth and I hope heaven is just like that!! cathathowells@yahoo.com

We booked our stay at the Villa Caterina a couple of months ago, and after reading the first TripAdvisor review from a couple of years ago, we very nearly cancelled our booking. I'm really glad we didn't... My 73-year-old mum and I visited the hotel and we felt that, overall, it was exactly what we'd been hoping for, a very pretty, small, family-run hotel in a good location. Some of the comments that the other two reviewers made were true though... yes, the shower cubicle was a touch small and in the same space as the toilet - but this was kind of a 'wet room' idea (fully tiled, with a sloping floor to drain the water away), and wasn't a problem. The shower itself was powerful enough and there was always hot water, bar one occasion. Yes, the folding concertina door to the shower cubicle had a little black mould on it, but it's difficult to avoid this in a shower that's so frequently used. I certainly wouldn't say that the room or the bathroom was unclean. The beds were comfy, sheets were clean, towels were replaced with clean ones every day (albeit a bit old and scratchy), glasses were washed and bins emptied. Yes, there were a lot of mosquitoes in Taormina, but hardly the fault of this hotel... I don't think a screen over the windows would help as there's a half-inch gap under the bedroom door, and mosquitoes can always find a way in - just take plenty of heavy-duty insect repellent! We even got satellite TV, which we hadn't expected - though only 2 Italian channels had good enough reception to watch. The comment from the last reviewer about the electricity rang true.. on one occasion we nipped out to the shop, leaving the light and the TV on, and came back 10 mins later to find that someone had been into our room and switched them off. A little unsettling, but we shouldn't really have been wasting electricity in the first place - bad tourist practice in a country where electricity is expensive. The staff weren't over-friendly but they weren't UNfriendly - our impression was that this was simply because they didn't speak enough English to hold lengthy conversations. When we arrived, we were pointedly told that the hotel had a bar, and that we could buy drinks off them, however there wasn't usually anyone around when we wanted a drink, so we drank our own from the local shop. But it would have felt rude to have requested ice from the hotel for drinks we had bought elsewhere, and I can understand that they would be a bit put-out at this. The one bit of unfriendliness we didn't appreciate was the slightly frosty breakfast waitress, who never seemed keen to grant us a second cup of coffee at breakfast. Our final complaint was that they didn't take credit cards (good job we asked!) as their credit card machine had broken. It was a nuisance to take out wodges of cash from the ATMs in Taormina during the week, but not a crisis. On the plus side though, this hotel is inexpensive, quiet (well, we thought so anyway), and it's absolutely beautiful, with a large and delightful garden full of shrubs, flowers, mature lemon trees dripping with lemons, and lizards. We spent hours in the dappled shade of the garden reading books, or sunbathing on the sunloungers. At the back of the garden is a gate leading to steps that go directly down to the 'private' beach at the back (not private to this hotel, but relatively restricted). It's a pebble beach and you can hire sunloungers and umbrellas for the day - 10 euros I think, not sure - and do things like windsurfing. Looked like there was a nice fish restaurant down there too - though we didn't try it. Breakfast at the hotel was lovely (especially if the waitress was in a good mood!), and was taken outdoors in the garden, under a sun umbrella. A lovely buffet spread - fresh fruit, yoghurt, cereal, bread rolls, butter, jam and marmalade, crispbreads, sweet biscuits, ham, cheese, cold sliced omelette, sweet apricot pie, and lovely coffee. Plus apricot croissants and extra coffee on a good day! And we felt that the hotel location was ideal, as it was out of the hustle and bustle of Taormina town centre, which can get VERY busy when there's a cruise ship docked in the bay. In contrast, the beach area at the bottom of the hill has more of a village-y feel - maybe a dozen hotels, about half-a-dozen restaurants and some nice shops, and close to the beach and the sea. It did mean we had to take the cable-car up to Taormina every day, which added to the cost slightly (a return cable car trip is 3 euros per person). But we liked taking the cable car - it's about 5 mins walk from the Villa Caterina, runs every 15 mins from 9am till 1am, and takes about 5 mins to get to the top. All in all, we were really pretty happy with this hotel. If it had had a swimming pool (it may be possible to use one of the pools in the neighbouring hotels, not sure), more plentiful breakfast coffee and a working credit card machine, it would have been almost perfect! Certainly we preferred it to some of the other hotels we saw - large soul-less package holiday places where we could hear the music from the 'Sicilian theme nights' when we walked past! And the Villa Caterina is inexpensive - we paid 102 euros per night for the room. If you like small pretty family hotels and aren't put off by the other comments, I'd recommend that you give this one a go - depends what you're looking for, of course. But we liked it.