Pros and Cons of Traveling to Italy

As you may have guessed, I love to travel and Italy is one of my favorite countries to visit. Now that summer is here, Italy will be flooded with tourists from all over the world, including some of us here in the Bay Area. That said, Italy seems to be a country of contradictions—it provides its own unique opportunities and challenges, which I will attempt to illustrate so that first-timers understand what awaits them. And before anyone accuses me of stereotyping Italy, I’d like to inform them that I report only that which I have personally experienced or witnessed, with the utmost affection for that beautiful place.

On the one hand, travelling to Italy, you get to ask yourself questions like, “Do I want to stay in a convent or a castle for this visit?” but on the other, you find yourself faxing your credit card information to someone in the middle of the night because that castle hasn’t quite caught up with the 21st century, which is probably what makes it so charming in the first place.

You get to feel like a pro traveler and use the convenient train system to get anywhere in a few short hours but then discover that the elevators in the train station don’t work, so you must lug your baggage up and down flights of stairs to get outside or catch your train.

You can find a beautiful hotel on the fourth floor of a building right in the middle of the city, but when you get there, you find that the fully-functioning elevator only serves odd-numbered floors, so you’re still lugging that baggage up the stairs and wondering why this keeps happening to you.

You find a gorgeous seaside inn like the kind you see only in movies, so dreamy and romantic you picture yourself as Sophia Loren in a beautiful dress on the terrace sipping a glass of wine, so you email them with a booking request, but they don’t respond. After a few days, you call them and they tell you that you can only book via email. You tell them you tried, they say they’ll respond, but never do.

You are told that the people are very friendly and nice but then you find store clerks try to shortchange you and someone runs over your toes with their luggage with nary a look back.

You are told that the people are rude and sick of tourists, but then the hotel manager runs home to get you a thermometer when you fall ill in a small, quiet town.

You finally figured out the bus system and you’re excited to take the bus to your hotel from the station, but the bus drivers are on strike today so you’re down to lugging your baggage again.

You decide to take a taxi to your hotel instead of lugging your baggage across town, so you tell the driver where you need to go and sit back in the cab, only to find the driver is crossing the river three times to get to the other side, and you realize this taxi ride is probably going to cost you double.

You snag a great room in a small family-run pensione, where your room looks out onto a courtyard and everything is tranquil, but you’re woken up at 6:30 by the singsong voice of one of the employees announcing that he’s going to be mopping the hallway and then proceeding to elaborate on how he feels about that.

You hop a train to Italy from France and you are awoken in the early morning by the yells of a French woman who is mad that she was awoken at the stop before her own (so that she has time to get ready), and she lets the conductor know it’s not that he’s being thoughtful, it’s that he’s being so careless and Italian.

You get a room in a small bed and breakfast where the owner makes you cappuccinos every morning with an array of goodies laid out on the table, but one morning it’s not there and when you later come back to your room you find a note apologizing for the lack of breakfast and explaining that the owner was simply out too late at the discotheque last night.

You, soccer fan that you are, find a great pub for watching the World Cup, Euro Cup, or whatever other cups there are, and you go there for every match you care about, until one day you mistake the date of the match and show up to watch it and the staff tell you that it’s actually because the match was cancelled, but they’ll call FIFA for you and clear it all up.

You wonder why some people seem to dislike tourists so much, especially if they power the economy, but then you try to book a hotel in a seaside village four months in advance only to find that the damn tourists have booked everything.

You are a hardened explorer and you will not be confused or surprised by the different commodes or the bidets or bizarre showers or anything else you’re used to that doesn’t look how it should, until you try to flush a toilet and end up ringing the alarm instead.

You get a photo with a Roman centurion outside the Colosseum because you think it’d make a funny souvenir of your time there, but it gets only funnier when you learn that most of the dressed-up centurions are actually Jewish.

You meet people with ulterior motives, people who think you’re a nuisance, or people who just have something they want to sell you, but then you listen to the chatter on the street below you as you watch the sunset light moving across vineyards and colorful hillside homes while you sip a glass of the best limoncello you’ve ever had, and you come to realize all that unpleasantness is just background noise compared to this.

Photos by Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco

Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco has gotten into the terrible habit of thinking too much about everything. She enjoys fantasizing about traveling, compulsively buying literature, laughing at her own puns, and consuming anything and everything that can be found in a bakery. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she got a degree in English. She can be found celebrating awesome female friendships on LadyBromance.com.

By Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco