services
in rome
the post office
getting things repaired
kid's schools in rome
getting medical help
finding a clean toilet
computers
By 'Services', we
mean where you can go to buy or pay for, or get more information about
the sort of things you might have to buy, or use, as distinct from
the things you merely want to buy or do whilst you're in Rome.
Things like postage stamps, electrical plugs, doctors, plumbers etc. Medicine,
schools for your children and so on.
The essentials...
We'll be updating and adding to this list. As you'll most likely want
to at least send a few postcards from Rome, we'll begin by saying a few
words about Italy's post office -
post office
If you just want a few stamps it'll probably be easier for you to just buy them at a 'tabaccheria' and then drop your postcards in the nearest postbox; Because of the incredible popularity of mobile phones in Italy, there's not much actual posting goes on at the Italian post office anymore. Then again, it's so inefficient, we frankly doubt if there ever was.
Go into any post office
in Rome and you will encounter two or three incredibly long queues - All
the people in these queues are queuing for the same thing - Not postage
stamps, but in fact something called the Conto Corrente. The Conto Corrente
is the Italian version of the Giro credit, and it is how most bills are
paid in Italy. All these people are queuing to pay something using a Conto
Corrente payment slip. One delightful feature of the Conto Corrente payment
slip is that almost no creditor who ever issues one bothers to have their
company name and payment details pre-printed on it, so it's about ten
minutes work to fill one in. You then queue for about forty minutes to
pay it, as there's only ever two or three clerk's windows open, and the
clerks operate at a ridiculously slow pace.
A recent sophistication of our local post office is a client-number waiting
system - You know, same as they have at busy delicatessens these days
- You go in, pull a numbered ticket out of a machine on the wall and wait
until your number is displayed above the teller's window. This sounds
like a good idea, but in practice the service is even slower than before
- All it does is accomplish the devious psychological feat of making the
customers feel as if they're gonna be attended to soon - In fact all it
does is take the immediate pressure off the clerks, so that they now operate
at an even slower pace, with no motivation to speed up. Typical Italian
solution. Eventually this service will fail, not because anyone will complain
about it, but because one day the numbering machine will break down and
no one will ever make the effort to come out and fix it - So they'll go
back to the old system of long, slow, angry queues while forty-thousand
dollars of taxpayer's money tied up in the failed numbering hardware will
sit rotting in a dusty corner of the post office.
If you do attempt to buy postage stamps in the post office, you'd better
buy plenty while you're there. (that's if you ever figure out which queue
to get in - I never do because nothing's ever sign-posted properly. We
don't advise you to post anything of value in Italy actually - it's unlikely
to reach its destination intact, if at all, even inland, let alone international
post. We've never yet received a parcel that hadn't been partially opened
by some nosy postal worker. The Italian post office does offer a recorded
delivery service, but from experience we've concluded that if (unknown
to you), the right amount of money changes hand at the other end, you'll
never receive your signed receipt of delivery.
computers
If you want to buy
a computer with English software and operating system on it, or extra
software applications in English language versions, if you're a Windows
kind of person, you're pretty much screwed in Italy.
But one solution is to switch to a Mac. Apple Macintosh dealers here seem
to be better set up for the language problem, and one such Apple reseller
in Rome that has their act together is 'FBM',
Via Flaminia 395. They can sell you a new Mac with the
English OS pre-installed, and several other popular third-party apps for
the Mac in English.
Click
here for MUCH more help
on computers in Italy
or Click here for FBM Apple in Rome
