Gioviano accommodation from AU$161

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Nice and comfortable room, great location, friendly staff.

This is a truly beautiful house with long views down to Lucca and olive groves all around. It is well-furnished and we slept really soundly. Massimo, the host, is extremely gracious and offers many great ideas for local activities and day trips, and once you find it the local supermarket is very well stocked. Having said all that, there are two "buts" to determine if this is the right fit for you. The key one is that "steep, winding, and narrow road" indicated in some comments is an understatement of the case. If you are not an experienced and confident driver with a relatively small car, you're going to have a challenge. The road goes from one lane to less than one car width, there are no shoulders, and the dropoffs are steep. It is very unlikely that a car service would agree to come pick you up. Issue #2, which is related to that, is that either you cook quite a bit in the well-appointed kitchen or you stay out for lunch and dinner (meaning drive up the hill in the dark). It is a good 20-25 minutes to anywhere and you get to navigate the hill both ways. We would go out for the day, enjoy an Italian lunch, pick up supplies for dinner, and head home to cook and enjoy that. (Issue #3: if you are a crazy cat person, use your common sense and do not feed the feral cats that roam the mountain as the people before us did.) Again, we very much enjoyed our stay once we figured it all out but you need a small car and you better be a good driver.