From the July issue of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine

HOTEL SMERALDO, Rome, Italy

The Smeraldo is one of the few deals still to be had in the capital, where prices have crept to Manhattan rates. Rooms are respectable – beds firm enough to bounce a bottle of Chianti off, quality soft furnishings – but the shower is the size of a cupboard. The elevator, too, is designed with Lilliputians in mind, but take such downsides in your stride and there’s ample pay-off in the location: a few minutes’ walk to the Campo de Fiori, Piazza Navona and Largo Argentina.

Doubles from £96, B&B (00 39 668 75929, www.smeraldoroma.com).

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HOTEL DU ROY D’ARAGON, Corsica

Down on the waterfront of Bonifacio, £43 will barely buy you lunch. Look above, though, and you’ll see the salmon-coloured facade of Roy d’Aragon – airmail-blue shutters and white wrought-iron balconies completing a frontage that could have been pinched from a Poirot novel. Interiors are Ikea-chic, but the location in the island’s loveliest harbour town mitigates the flatpack feel.

Doubles from £43, room only (00 33 495 730399, royaragon.corsud.org).

HOTEL ERIDANUS, Athens, Greece

Doubles in this handsome, 38-room Neo-Classical house are hotter than mamma’s moussaka, so book early. You’ll understand why when you get your first glimpse of the view: unmatched vistas across the craggy reaches of the city and Acropolis (book the slightly pricier room 502 for the best). Enjoy your breakfast eggs alfresco on your balcony, as the sounds of the city ebb and blur below. A recent refit has given the decor a masculine edge, but the clean lines and quality linens are winners.

Doubles from £80, room only (00 30 210 520 5360, www.eridanus.gr).

IL PELLEGRINO, Rapallo, Italy

Hikers like this place, high on its hermity perch above the Riviera, and served by a sardine-can cable car (£5 return). Once a lodge for pilgrims to Santuario di Montallegro, the church nearby, it’s now a family-run hotel, and so spartan it’s almost self-flagellatory. But ooh, the view: specks of yachts leaving trails across the Gulf of Tigullio, and the land rearing to tiny towns, scattered in the folds of the mountains.

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