Anyone looking for accommodation in Italy should try www.easystanza.it. It came highly recommended by the assistants in the year above us

(I'm still on the lookout for accomodation at the moment though )

It's definitely worth checking out the university noticeboards too - there are always loads of Italians flyering in search of other students to fill up their flats, and that way you get to live with locals, share costs and pick up their accent! Being asked if you're from Milan while you're travelling around Italy will be the biggest ego boost ever

Hi all,

I'm currently in my 2nd year of university and doing an ERASMUS study placement at the Universita' degli Studi di Genova in Italy.

Whilst www.easystanza.it is, for the most part, a useful and reliable tool, I would highly recommend the following as alternative accommodation search websites:

www.kijiji.it
www.bakeca.it
www.subito.it

The reason for this is because I found my first apartment via Easystanza and the landlady who I was renting from turned out to be a professional criminal. My flatmates and I were housed between illegal, plaster of Paris walls, all of our contracts were fakes, we had faked 'cessione' (questura registration) documents and, to top it all off, the crazy woman came round every single morning, banging on the doors, screaming, shouting and, on one occasion, throwing my flatmate's belongings over the balcony. This was a deliberate attempt to get people to move out in fear/frustration so that she could rent their room to some other poor foreign student who didn't know what they were letting themselves in for at an extortionate price and with an enormous deposit.

Whilst there must be very few landlords/landladies on easystanza who behave in such a manner, I was very unimpressed by the efforts of the website itself to remove this woman's posts after my flatmates and I sent numerous complaint emails and also sent scanned in copies of the police and legal documents which we all clubbed in for and had her served with to try and get our deposits back. When reporting her adverts to the other websites listed above, they were swiftly removed and we received a thank you email which suggests to me that, in general, these sites care much more about the young travellers using them.

Good luck! And don't hesitate to get in touch if you would like any advice on Genova (or, for that matter, Paris)!

I'm sorry to hear about such an awful experience! Unfortunately I think easy stanza, as much as any website, and advert, does require a degree of caution when looking for accommodation although there reaction is admittedly unimpressive.

I was lucky, I found a place through easystanza and have had a great time

*about accommodation in Paris? I'm looking for somewhere in September, for a month. Any suggestions?

xxx

Well when I stayed there I did part-time au pairing so I lived with a family for free but only worked a couple of hours each evening. I got a pretty good deal!

Another free option to investigate, if you like books, is Shakespeare & Co book store. They offer a bed in the book shop for a few hours volunteer work I believe.

For pay-for places, the best I could do really would be to recommend zones rather than specific hotels because I had most of my accommodation there for free thanks to doing a bit of work, as above, or because I used www.couchsurfing.com. I have several friends who have stayed in the 'sunshine hostel' and had a fantastic time if you can find that.

In general I would say:

*avoid the Montmartre area like the plague if you're a single female
*avoid staying near the train stations or out in the suburbs
*a fantastic place to stay is the Latin quarter, around the university (5th, 6th, 7th arrondissement)
*if you have a fair bit of money to spare I would also highly recommend the 16th arrondissement, Trocadero area. You're in a beautiful, wealthy area and only 5-10 minutes walk from the Eiffel tower and Champs Elysee. That's where I was lucky enough to be for most of my time there.

Wishing you the best of luck, hopefully this has been of some help. I'm glad to hear you had a much better experience with Easystanza than I did

Sophie