My feet impatiently tapped the marble floor of Rome’s central post office, as my eyes lingered on the Renaissance frescoes and decorated columns. The colossal traffic jam outside was silenced by the sound of rustling papers and a voice intermittently calling out numbers.
A stout woman with a prominent nose re-appeared from the back room. “Non é qui,” she stated with an air of finality. It’s not here. My heart sank.
It all began two months ago with a little black card. Halfway through my one-year exchange in Bologna, I was 10 kilos heavier and living la dolce vita, when I realised my debit card was about to expire and I’d soon be left penniless in the land of Prada, Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana.
After a few frantic phone calls, I realised my parents could activate my new card in Sydney and bring it along with them when they came to meet me in Italy in a couple of days. Problem solved. Perfect plan.
It didn’t work. Perfectly simple plans never do. Although my card made it to the northern hemisphere, my mum forgot to give it to me and it wasn’t until she had come and gone, that I realised I only had my current card with a mere 26 days left on it.
I panicked. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do as I was about to leave Italy and my parents were still travelling in Europe.
A couple more distressed phone calls later, we came up with a second plan of action – I was going to be in Rome for one day at the end of July so upon returning to Australia, my mum would send my card via express post to the Poste Restante department of PosteItalia in Rome, where it would wait until I picked it up in person. Perfect plan.
A couple more distressed phone calls later, we came up with a second plan of action – I was going to be in Rome for one day at the end of July so upon returning to Australia, my mum would send my card via express post to the Poste Restante department of PosteItalia in Rome, where it would wait until I picked it up in person. Perfect plan.
But on July 30, four days after it was supposed to arrive, it wasn’t there. The woman in the post office started getting agitated as I stood there at a loss for words. “Non é qui,” she insisted one last time. Case closed.
Up until that point, I had been a naive, pasta-devouring young girl, in love with the romance of Italy. I had read my fair share of When in Rome and Eat, Pray, Love and was waiting for an Italian stallion on a red Vespa to whisk me off my feet to meet his hairy-chinned mamma.
As I walked out of the cool, austere post office and onto the chaotic cobbled streets of Rome, I burst into a blubbering fit. I was leaving Italy again with absolutely no access to any money and an Italian vocabulary starved of abusive words to vent my frustration.
It was then that it started dawning on me. Yes, Italy is beautiful in every way – the food, the language, the history, the men… but nothing ever works. The fractured, slow and complicated administration system finally got me infuriato. My teachers in Bologna often failed to show up to class, let alone to the exams they were conducting and there were always a billion forms to fill out, even posting a letter could take a good hour. So much for the romance.
It turned out Australia Post was well-aware of this ‘real’ Italy. According to a girl on the phone, Australia Post considers Italy’s national postal system to be “too unreliable” so they use DHL to deliver packages once they are in Italy instead. Unfortunately for me, DHL doesn’t deliver packages for Poste Restante and so it had been rejected by PosteItalia … every day.
So there I was, with an expired card and no access to money. As I was flying out of Rome that evening, I rang DHL and begged them to hold onto my card until I returned at the end of August.
Thanks to a great friend I was travelling with, I managed to survive with next to no money for the next few weeks as we put everything on her card – laundry, bus tickets and Immodium. That’s Liv’s way you see, always accumulating debt.
Three weeks later and back in the city filled with the aroma of fuel and freshly brewed espressos, I called DHL in Italy to see if they could deliver my card to the apartment I was staying in. After talking to six people on the phone (all equally unhelpful) and pressing a hundred buttons, a woman finally reassured me it would be delivered the next day.
Three days passed with more excuses as to why they couldn’t deliver my card. I had had enough. It was now September and my activated card had travelled twice across the world since June.
I decided to take matters into my own hands. Storming into the surprisingly dreary, dilapidated DHL office in Rome, I demanded that the large hairy-chested men in stained white singlet tops hand over my package.
What came out was an envelope with a hundred notes scribbled all over it, changes of address, stamps, glad wrap, bubble wrap and tape. After spending five minutes trying to open it, I finally found my card.
Having tried to get my card since June, spoken to a hundred people on the phone for weeks and spent hours worrying about the Italian postal system, I turned over my card and realised one thing – it’s easy to complain about the failings of the Italian system but nothing beats the vibrancy and passion of the country; the nonnas gossiping while making fresh orrechiette, a police force dressed in Armani, or a womanising Prime Minister obsessed with plastic surgery. It is what it is and it somehow works.
And at the end of the day, any system can fail.
Or you can have a mother who makes a mistake and signs the back of your debit card.
