Welcome to Room 102

The Hotel Cittadella in the town of Cittadella (Veneto, Italy) is one of the most curious places I have spent a night. At first glance, the hotel (in which I stayed yesterday on a business trip) is a fairly standard 3-4 star establishment, with most of the mod cons you would expect and a good breakfast to boot. What sets it apart is the surreal decor. Imagine walking into the lobby and passing a dressmaker's dummy wearing a ballgown on one side and a gas fire located at head height on the other. While you wait to check in you might like to sit on the off white rococo banquette or perhaps rest your feet on a monochrome leather foot stool. Once you have your tasseled key (or key card - some rooms use one technology, some the other) and made your way down a corridor painted with fruit trees in pastel shades, eerily reminiscent of a psychiatric ward at the hospital where I once worked, you can finally rest your weary bones, perhaps glancing up at one of the oddly positioned skylights (20 feet above you) if you are on the top floor.
The piece de resistance though, has to be the bar. The size of a small dentist's waiting room, this area, which appeared to be self-service, as we never saw a bartender, has a number of memorable features. The combination of animal print carpet on the top half of the walls and one door (black and white, although I pause to call it zebra print, as I've never seen a zebra with markings like it), accompanied by a silver curtain and another door of green glass, is bizarre enough. But when that decor sits alongside wood panelling (the bottom half of the walls), clear glass tables and metallic chairs and a series of classic Coca-Cola adverts more suited to a 1950s diner (as well as a colourised photo of an unknown Hollywood starlet), you have to start to fear for the sanity of the decorators. Either that or bow down before their genius. Sit back and enjoy a Splügen beer (an Italian lager with a German name, natch) and drink it all in. And only when you leave do you realise that you have been sitting in Room 102: the bar is in a converted bedroom, although one so small that you can barely imagine a cot fitting comfortably in there, let alone a bed for a paying guest. Truly remarkable.