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the post office

getting things repaired

kid's schools in rome

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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 

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