The hotel is ideally situated near open air markets , within walking distance of the Porta Nuova RR Station, close to the Parco del Valentino and bus stops to the Palazzo Reale, Duomo San Giovanni Battista sindone, Mole Antonelliana, Palazzo Madama, Egyptian Museum, and on and on. We walked all the areas around the hotel and did not feel threatened in any way. I can't see why anyone would think this. Some of the people in the area are not what you would consider upper middle class but they certainly weren't homeless or panhandlers.

Hotel is located about 5 minutes walk from the main railway station, if busing from the airport get dropped at the station. It is easiest to walk through the station and exit onto Nissi St. The hotel staff are most helpful answering all requests, and refreshments were made available to guests on arrival. Breakfast was continental but of a higher standard than the usual. Room was very comfortable. One can easily walk to town centre taking in the sights down Via Roma or catch nearby trams 18 or 61 to Via Po. There is a large Saturday market close to the hotel. A must in Turin is the trip to Basilica Di Superga. Get a Turin card you will easily recover your outlay.

We stayed at the Piemontese for an overnight stopover bookending a holiday to Tuscany by rail. Our main priorities in booking were the proximity of our hotel to the train station and somewhere we could get a good rest. In these respects the Piemontese can't be faulted. It is five minutes walk from Torino Porta Nova train station on a relatively quiet city street. Both of the two rooms that we stayed in were comfortable, well furnished and cool in the evening and overnight heat.

A further positive was the helpfulness of the hotel reception staff. They made excellent recommendations for places to eat (Du Monde is a two minute walk and does superb four course set menus including wine and water for around 30-35 euros a head) and were otherwise efficient and polite in all our dealings with them.

Whilst we can understand previous criticism of this hotel with respect to parking and wi-fi (things that did not affect us), we must disagree with comments regarding the area. The hotel is in a largely residential area with the street level floors of buildings occupied by businesses from butchers to bars, tailors to takeaways. We saw nothing to suggest that this was 'Chinatown' as has been stated by another reviewer. The large groups of people mentioned by other reviews we can only assume were the ten to fifteen locals congregated around bars and takeaways in the evenings. Shock horror. People going out of an evening to eat, drink and socialise. A little perspective please.

Overall, if you are looking for a reasonably-priced city stopover with great travel links then this is your hotel. If you are in the car, can't live a day without facebook and are used to the sprawling, country estate style Best Western then give it a miss.

We booked this Hotel on the basis that we were looking for a cost-effective place to stay on our short trip to Turin. However, I've found that the pictures on the expedia and best western websites are misleading and the problem with parking is not made clear (not even mentioned by expedia). There's no on-street parking reserved for hotel guests, but there is an agreement with a secure car park a couple of blocks away ... at a cost of 15e per 24 hours. My partner had previously stayed in another Best Western hotel in Turin which had it's own parking so this was an unexpected extra hassle to our trip. This wasn't the only inconvenience, the next problem was that the Hotel only had a handful of passes for the car park so whenever you took your car out, you had to drive back to the Hotel to hand the car park pass back.

The Hotel advertises free wifi to guests and although we were given log-on details for the PC in the foyer, we never managed to get connected to the internet. Other guests staying in this hotel couldn't get connected in their room with their laptop and appeared to have difficulty connecting in the foyer too.

When booking the Hotel I had made the reservation for a double room, but on arrival we were met by two single beds. When we queried this with Reception (to be fair most of the staff spoke good English) we were told that they were unable to sort this until the next day. Their solution ... pushing the two beds together and covering with double bedding (it wouldn't have been too bad had the beds not been on wheels and managed to work their way apart during the night!).

We certainly won't be offering this Hotel to any friends/family becuase of our experience on this trip and becuase of the area of Turin where the hotel is. It's not the nicest.