Staying at Affittacamere Le Farfalle in La Spezia

When we went to CinqueTerre, we made a conscious decision to stay at La Spezia over one of the five lands, mainly to ensure that we would not need to lug around our luggage through steep steps which most reviews had for the nice places we considered in CinqueTerre. You can read about our CinqueTerre adventure here.

La Spezia is the main station where you can grab the train to CinqueTerre from the other places in Italy so it was a very practical to stay there instead.

We found Affittacamere La Farfalle through booking.com. Affittacamere means landlady in English, but I think it's used to mean Bed and Breakfast. They had nice photos, good reviews, and most importantly, was a 5 minute walk from the station. But take note, we didn't realize that it's a walk through cobblestones, so you're better off taking a cab which we did on our way back.

The landlady Patrizia was very nice, and waited for us to arrive as she normally does not stay in the property. She only comes in the morning to serve breakfast, and comes to greet the guests based on their arrival time. We arrived a bit later than planned because we did a detour to Pisa which you can read about here, but she was very patient.

La Farfalle has three rooms, which are all butterfly themed. 

The rooms were all on the ground floor but security was tight, the rooms were big and had a clean, cozy modern feel.

The breakfast included as part of the room is what you can expect from a standard bed and breakfast in Italy, but they leave you to choose what you want from the pastry basket and you can help yourself to as much as you want. Coffee, Juice and Yogurt are available as well so while it's not impressive, it's also not too bad compared to the limited selection you get at other places.

Check-out time is at 10:00am as Patrizia leaves the place after she checks out the guests. There is also no place to leave your luggage but if you are travelling by train, it actually makes more sense to leave your luggage at the train station instead for a nominal fee.

We had some time to spare to have a quick look around La Spezia after our trip back from CinqueTerre adventure which you can read about here.

OOh... they have a Tiger Store.
You can read about why I love Tiger here.

What we've seen of La Spezia. We didn't go far because we didn't want to
miss our train to Florence. Unfortunately we didn't find a place that sold pesto.

We ended up trying the Walnut Sauce instead
from the store at the train station, but it wasn't
good enough for us to hoard.

Perhaps next time it would be good if we had more time to explore La Spezia, see the sea from this part of the coast, and visit some food markets as well. But it was definitely the best decision to stay here and use it as our home based for our CinqueTerre adventure. just saying.