The Al Gallo hotel is about 10 min walk from the the train station. There are nice places to eat nearby.

Ideal location, directly located a few passes from the Venice train station. Hostel was clean and simple. Nice old building with a rather nice view from our room. Comfy bed and clean bathroom.

Biggest downside was the curfew ... even on new year's eve! No elevator and the hot water didn't always work.

Besides that I would definitely recommend and revisit. Nice place.

First impressions sometimes can be everything, and it is certainly the case here.
Our first impression was: Let's get out of here as quickly as we can!

We arrived early, after booking on a travel site noting in the communication, apparently sent to the proprietor via the site, that we would be there at 10am.
Denoting this, we made the assumption that they would email us with some sort of instructions if that was to be a problem. We fully expected that we would end up leaving our luggage with them, as in every other hotel we have ever stayed at in the entire world, exploring the city while waiting for the room to be ready. We arrived to the little hotel on a sidestreet in Venice by completely ignoring the worst directions ever provided on a travel site (venere.com), and rang the bell. It was about 10am as anticipated. The lady that came to the door, we found out later to be the housekeeper, seemed extremely annoyed by our presence and didn't speak any English. Since we were obviously in an Italian speaking country, that didn't seem to be the problem, as she basically ignored all possibilities of communication and just asked for our passports after we said (in English, still not realizing she spoke absolutely no English) that we had a reservation. She promptly had a fairly extensive conversation with her boss on the telephone and then told us (in Italian, which we understood enough with our knowledge of Spanish) that her boss would be there shortly and write down our information for our passports, then return them to us. No problem. She gave us a key and brought us to the room that we assumed was the room we reserved, but of course, had no real idea at this point if they even had our reservation. We thought, despite the rudeness, that we were lucky to have the room though! Usually, arriving early in a city means leaving your luggage and carrying around the most important things with you around the sights.

So, our first impression was to run (given her attitude and completely unwelcoming demeanor), but we stayed thinking that.. well, we had already guaranteed the room with our credit card over the Internet, and we actually had a room. We ignored the fact that the conversation she had with the proprietor seemed to be very angry.

A little while later, I went down to ask about the passports and clarify our reservation with the proprietor. I walked down the stairs while the proprietor was sitting at the desk talking with some Brits. I smile as he stares at me and I say hi. He continues to glare at me as if I had just insulted his mother. Feeling quite strange that I had somehow, quite unintentionally, interrupted this conversation, I said hi again. He said Bonjourno and I smiled and said it back. He continued to stare at me, still with this completely insulted look pasted over his elderly face. I stuttered a bit and said that I had just come down to check about our passports, to which he replied in length that he had to record it, as done for everyone, everywhere in Italy -- even Italians -- and he would return them. They would not go anywhere and he showed me the passports as if to prove that he had not hidden them away or sold them on the black market. I pause again and said, no problem. I continued by stating that it seemed like there was some confusion about the reservation and he goes into a rant about having providing the room to us without any obligation to do so before check-in time and a secondary rant about my not speaking Italian, while the chambermaid (his words) not speaking any English. At all of this, I'm quite taken aback and I really was not sure what to say. He continues with a statement accusing me of complaining. I respond with the fact that I'm not complaining at all -- all I came down for was to ask about the reservation and the passports. Then, he said he would have the passports ready when I come down again. I tried to ask when exactly I should "come down again", but he cut me off and I gave up. Eventually, the chambermaid brought our passports up to the room and I thanked her. In the meantime, we considered leaving, giving up the equivalent of about $250 USD and finding another place, but decided to stay and save wasting a lot of money because the people were complete and utter a**holes.

Later, we left the building to start our sightseeing and the proprietor started on a rant again, but after almost resulting in a fistfight, I held out the olive branch (very appropriate in Italy, I suppose) and things settled down. Of course, all we wanted to convey was that we were in a triple room and we had only booked a double, so we wanted to make sure there was no confusion on the reservation. (He seemed to really be insulted by the word "confusion".) But, what ensued was utter madness. Despite running a hotel, the proprietor was among the craziest people we have ever met.

There was no safe in the room as was advertised! We did mention this casually after the nutter calmed down on the second exchange, but then he went into a 10 minute story on how you don't need a safe here -- that once someone left 1000 euros in their room and the chambermaid found it and reported it to him, then eventually the guests received every penny, so to speak. The rooms use a skeleton key from the 1800's, so not having a safe to store passports and money didn't give us all that much confidence in his supposedly reassuring story of utmost honesty and safety. He then instructed us on how to quadruple lock the front door of the building. A bit ironic.

The rest of the stay was pleasant enough, as I bit my tongue and listened to him go off on unusually long stories about nothing when we were unlucky enough to enter or leave the building while he was at the front desk. As polite Canadians, we endured these lengthy, albeit much more pleasant, rants.

If you find anywhere else in Venice, stay there. The craziness that was this hotel is not worth the average rooms and above average cost (at least in American or Canadian dollars!). The hotel didn't have a tripadvisor listing when I looked (I must have copied the spelling wrong from the site we booked with), so we took a chance, only to regret it. We thought we had found a quaint, out-of-the-way place that would be our little sanctuary while visiting Venice for the first time. We found utter hell which set the tone for our first days in Italy. We also rent out beach and city rooms in Costa Rica, so we understand the importance of customer service -- that being said, if you don't care about the interaction with the staff of a hotel, then maybe... no, nevermind. Don't even chance it. There are much better places to stay at lesser cost in Venice. In the end, we found the room nice and spacious, but we also found many very pleasant people in Venice that would have given us a much more positive impression of Venice and Italy on our first day there. Some may say that he may have just been having a bad morning, but the fact that a hotel proprietor would be so completely rude, utterly oblivious to our questions and jump to such negative conclusions about said questions, only shows his lack of common sense and/or customer service. In the end he was very nice to us, but don't chance it that you get an "off day".

This is really small place, there is small everything - the side street in which it´s situated, its lobby, staircase, room itself, even the bed and the breakfast.
But we looked for a cheap place near the train station but not much far from the centre, and we spent there one night only and we were just a little time in the room so it was ok for us. It was clean, and in some way cute, the worst on it was a pigeon who lives somewhere near the window of our room and made noise all night. Unfortunately the beast was hidden behind wood beam out of reach :-)