Italy is a tourist’s mecca —but beware!

Press, 7 October 1980, Page 13

Italy is a tourist’s mecca —but beware!

By

JOHN WILSON,

editorial staff of “The. Press”

Italy has attracted tourists since tourism began. But every summer sees in the British press a spate of articles under headings like: “When in Rome, beware ” or “Highway robbery, Italian style.” The deterrent effect of these articles cannot be great for last July I found Italy overrun, even in a summer when a weak dollar had kept many Americans at home.

The articles are, unfortunately, accurate. Mention having been to Italv and others who have been there will immediately recount their own particular versions of the stories .which illustrate the maxim of one travel writer: that in Italy "the price of not being taken to the cleaners, is :.. eternal vigilance.”: Most of the stories centre on unscrupulous Italians taking advantage of the usual tourist’s ignorance of the

language and lack of familiarity with a confusing currency. I had been on. Italian soil barely an hour when a taxidriver charged me about twice as much for one kilometre ride as an eight kilometre ride had just cost me in Geneva, one of Europe’s most expensive cities.

It was then, a couple of hours before leaving Italy, that a guard on a train demanded a "supplement” (although our tickets had been issued with, all supplements paid in Switzerland) and then changed our Swiss francs at a rate which, compared with the bank rate, was theft when we decided to pay the supplement rather than fruitlessly argue the point. * Between these two incidents we were caught often by street vendors and shopkeepers casually shortchanging us, until we learnt the first

rule of touring in Italy — stubbornly count your change and demand that any missing lira be handed over. We escaped at least the picked pockets, snatched wallets, or burgled hotel rooms of which other friends who had visited Italy told us when we recounted our misfortunes. True as such stories are, the crowds still flock to Italy — the women with their money pinned to their bras and the men with money belts wound round their waists. They flock there with good reason, for Italy is justifiably a tourist mecca. Its treasures are incomparable; its buildings superb; its townscapes perhaps unmatched, and its urban life endlessly intriguing. Unfortunately, the crowds of tourists too often obstruct a view or interfere with the enjoyment of a trip. The other trick about enjoying a trip to

Italy (besides learning how to cope with the Italians out to gyp you) is to escape from other tourists. It can be done with surprising ease, even in crowded Venice. In St Marks Square, throughout our stay (except when we crossed it in the very early morning on our way to catch a vaporetto to the station) there were more people than pigeons. But when we exchanged St Marks (disappointingly dumpy and faded after the churches of Florence and Rome) and the Doges Palace for the charming, tightly packed tenements and houses of a more humble residential area, studded with churches, whose canals and small squares were stones of unstudied domestic life, we saw only a handful of other tourists through a full afternoon. We also paid 2500 lira in a small trattoria for a better meal than the one for which we had paid 7500 lira the night before in a restaurant on the tourist-jammed Riva on St Marks Bay.