Giardini Mon Plaisir

What a beautiful place! When you drive there the first time you might think the surrounding is not so pretty but do not let it influence you. The location is super. The hotel is very good. Breakfast is good. Beds are good. Hotel is very clean. The people are nice. Agostino and Allessandro were a great help and a nice chat. I highly recommend to try a cocktail or non alcoholic cocktail by the pool made by Allessandro. The restaurants Agostino recommends are very nice. They can help you make a reservation or you can do it yourself, tell the restaurants you are staying in giardini mon plaisir if you make the reservation by yourself. We liked restaurant grilli, this is nice to visit on one of your first nights because it's a lovely ambiance and nice streets filled with shops and we love people watching. More quiet is osteria la dolce vita. This restaurant is also popular with the locals, the food at both places is excellent. Stavento is abit more fancy. The view by the water is very beautiful at night. The food is great, but it was great everywhere we went. One night we wanted to keep it very casual and went to I love pizza. Also recommend. The cozze(i think it was called cozze, in Dutch its called mosselen) and the bruschetta are really nice and the pizzas also really nice. Its nice to shop in the area surrounding the hotel(15-20min walk) Favignana (Island) is very nice for beaches, nice small town and cycling around the island. When you want to buy tickets for liberty lines(boat), you cannot buy tickets online for the same day, so we recommend buying one day in advance, or maybe buying tickets in the harbor of you want to go the same day? We bought them online. They recommend to rent an electric bike on the island but when we arrived they no longer had the electric bikes so we used a regular bike. This was absolutely fine. You sweat ofcourse but it's nice to get some exercise. Hats are a necessity. Cooling down with a nice ice cream inside the shop in the town with airconditioning. Giardini mon plaisir: highly recommended.

When you are looking for an authentic experience in Sicily, there's no better place I could imagine. A wonderful garden around a historic Pallazo, a spotlessly clean room, fresh and well served breakfast and great hospitality by Agostino, whose family owns this place for generations. When this is your base for a tour through the delights this area of Sicily has to offer - and there are quite a lot - you'll be in best hands and no doubt, you'll enjoy it.

Our pre-stay interactions with Giardini Mon Plaisir were excellent - prompt, meaningful emailed responses and some helpful tailored emails on what to do in Trapani and its surrounds. On arrival at the gate of Giardini Mon Plaisir you do have a sense of disquiet, it being surrounded by high rise apartments in a nondescript street , but once you enter its grounds that sense disappears as you see the beautiful building before you. Check in with the owner, Agostino, was prompt and friendly. Our daughters were in the studio room on the ground floor and my wife and I were up the stairs in the Levante room on the first floor. The accommodation was spotless, very tastefully furnished and of more than adequate size (although the shower was a bit on the small side). As we had travelled from south eastern Sicily that day, rather than go out for a meal we had pre-arranged and pre-ordered dinner at Giardini Mon Plaisir - we were glad we did; the food was excellent, as was the service. It was very quiet, both at night and during the day. The breakfast was excellent - friendly table service, good coffee, cold meats, pastries, croissants, scrambled eggs and bacon, that kind of thing. We liked that it was a 15 minute walk (mainly uphill, but not steep, primarily along a main street) to the cable way that takes you up to Erice. Would definitely recommend a visit to Erice, the views alone make it worthwhile. Having adopted Agostinho's excellent suggestion of having dinner in Erice (he kindly booked for us), we walked back from the cableway late at night - the walk was well lit and felt very safe, enhanced by there being a police presence at the base of the cableway. Giardini Mon Plaisir is about a 15 - 20 minute drive to the old town (in the context that we drove there on a Saturday morning so there was lots of Saturday morning shopping traffic). There was plenty of meter paid parking (coins only), adjacent to the sea, at what is the start of the pedestrianized shopping street. Definitely worth a visit of a few hours, plenty of places to have lunch. Check out was easy and friendly. We really enjoyed our stay, definitely the place for us should we return to Trapani.