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Chapter 7 - Italian Tiles
Hotel Alfredo, Roma, Italia, consists of three floors. At street level is a small lobby with a bright, newly installed tile floor. The white tiles have tiny red and green flowers along their borders and were chosen to give the lobby a cheery, vibrant Italian feeling. A thick, glass wall with an arched glass door in the center, installed at considerable expense the previous year, is all that separates this lobby from the busy sidewalk. Four new, bright white couches with stylishly thin cushions form a loose square in front of the check-in and cashier desk at the back of the lobby. The guest sitting on a couch feels as if he is in the window of an Italian shop rather than a lobby. Traffic is heard day and night and eye contact with pedestrians on the sidewalk is hard to avoid. The hall to the left of the cashier leads to several shops selling expensive Italian goods and British and American newspapers and magazines. Despite the endless complaints of the Italian employees, these shops remain open from nine to nine with no break for lunch, though the hotel management routinely leaves the premise from one until four and sometimes till five or five thirty. For many years, these shops were closed off from the hotel and rented to tailors and cobblers. Then the current management, a conglomerate of Roman lawyers, took over and remade the hotel on the International model, leading to the successful booking of British and American tour groups. All employees of the Alfredo, formerly Hotel St. Stephen III, are now required to know some English, though many refuse to use it in the presence of the hotel guests. The few Italians who have stayed at the Alfredo since the re-modeling did not like all the foreigners about and moved down the street to the Hotel Tivoli.