After more than 30 years of both business and leisure travel, our experience at the Edelweiss in the medieval hilltop town of Erice, Sicily may be the most unfortunate of all. This hotel should not be in business, and perhaps reported to the Italian government for unethical business practices. We arrived in February, and only 3 hotels in Erice were open. Unfortunately, we chose the Edelweiss for our one night stay. The hotel has Visa/Mastercard signs on display, and a credit card processing machine. We were told the price would be 60 euros. We were also told that our room was on the first floor (room 107), but had to take luggage up two flights of stairs to our room. The halls are completely unlit, so at night we were groping around for light switches when other hotels install motion-detector activated hall lighting. Our room was dusty and had a slight odor which I initially attributed to it being unused for a long period of time. However, the odor never went away. When we first entered our room it felt cold, and we assumed that it would get warmer after the heat was on for a while. We opened the radiators to full but the room never got above 15 C/59 F degrees the entire night. This was only the start of our problems. The light in the bathroom did not work, the toilet leaked all over the floor, and the grand finale was attempting to shower in the morning with no hot water available at all. The staff was not helpful, bordering on hostile. The breakfast was quite uninspired and spare. The checkout was the final insult. I presented my credit card and was told that the price if we paid by credit card would be 82 euros, not 60 euros. We paid the 60 euros, and then had to cajole the proprietess into giving us a receipt, which is an Italian legal requirement. Asking for a receipt should not be necessary when one checks out of a hotel. In retrospect, we should have paid with a credit card and then charged it back. A hotel should not be in business if it can't provide adequate lighting, heat and hot water, supplies unclean rooms, and is run by uncaring staff. Do yourself a big, big favor and run far away from the Edelweiss when visiting Erice. I literally cannot recall a worse hotel experience.