I’ve been here for 5 days now and have had no time to write as I have been so busy working on our apartments.  However, yesterday I took my cousin to see Rome.  After all, she has never been to Italy and it is less than an hour away from our house. 

Lining Up in St Peters Square

It’s late October… we are pressing hard on low season here, but Rome was flooded with tourists.  As we walked down the streets, all we heard was English and German.  Every time we got near an ‘attraction’, it felt like we were at Disneyland on a Saturday in June.  The line to get into St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican consisted of tens of thousands of people.  Everywhere we went was crowded beyond belief.  You just couldn’t enjoy a thing, and this is LATE OCTOBER!  Ugh!

The Trevi Fountain obscured by Junk Souvenirs

The tourist trap stands were out in force, and since it was raining a little on and off, there were armies of people trying to force umbrellas on us.  Do people actually buy plastic St. Peter’s

snow globes?  I mean, where do they put this stuff when the get home, anyway? 

 It was all just over the top.  Maybe I was just tired, but it really showed what i always say about the touristy areas of Italy:  They were once beautiful places, but have been destroyed by the ravages of mass tourism.  The real Italy… the experience that really leaves you wanting to come back over and over… can only be found in the villages outside the cities.

Home Sweet Home

As we left Rome last night, a sense of relief swept my body.  The closer I got to home, the better I felt.  I got home, went to bed, and woke up at sunrise.  I made my coffee and went outside.  After snapping pictures of the tourist traps of Rome all day yesterday, I couln’t help but snap a picture of the Alto Lazio and Umbria countryside at dawn from my house… such a contrast.  No plastic towers of Pisa here.  Just nature, peace and quiet.  Ahhhhhh.

Some people travel to Italy, see the sights, eat the food, and go home thinking they experienced Italian culture.  In reality, the vast majority of these people only experienced a tiny fraction of the amazing culture that Italy offers.  You cannot experience the true Italy from a traditional tour, or by visiting the standard tourist destinations like Rome, Tuscany, Venice, etc. 

To really experience Italian culture and beauty, you have to get off the beaten path, away from all of the tourist traps.

The problem for most people is that they either don’t know how or where to go, or that the adventure of getting in a car and just driving is just too overwhelming.  CultureDiscovery.com provides the adventure , while helping remove all of the unknown for you. 

Soriano nel Cimino is a stunning small medieval Italian village of roughly 8,000 people that is largely undiscovered, while being strategically located within a short drive to the best Italy has to offer.  In ancient times, its castle was the summer Vatican.

When you are traveling, sometimes you can just feel it. You go to pay for something, and you just know that if you were a local, you would have paid a much lower price. You are an ‘unsuspecting tourist’, and they will take you for what you’ve got. Here is a link to a New York Times article on this subject so that you really get the point.

So how can you avoid this? Here are some steps you can take:

It generally only happens in the tourist traps

It is really interesting to see the difference between a place that is full of tourists, and one that has limited tourism. Where you find streets full of tourists, the locals tend to bite the hand that feeds them. In places where tourism hasn’t quite caught on yet, the locals welcome the tourists as guests. I’ve seen tourists in Rome or Tuscany get ’special’ menus with inflated prices, and I have seen tourists in Soriano nel Cimino get special menus with lower prices than the locals get!

Food: It is all about the menu

You may walk into a restaurant and be handed a menu in English. What a convenience, you may think. But consider that if the place has an English-only menu, they also have a menu for Italians. There is a chance that the prices are different. Also, if the place does not have prices on the menus, beware, as they can give you any price they want.

I remember once I was in Pompeii with some other Americans that didn’t speak Italian. We went to a restaurant, and as they heard us speaking English, they handed us English menus. I glanced at it, and considering that I was accustomed to ordering in Italian, I asked (in Italian) for the Italian menu. The waiter was caught off guard, excused himself and gave me the Italian menu. It took about 30 seconds before I noticed the prices were much lower on my Italian menu than they were on the English menu.

Must you really eat 100 feet from the Spanish Steps?

Perhaps it is the steep rent they have to pay, or perhaps it is due to the steady flow of tourists that think the Euro is play money, but the closer you are to a major tourist attraction, the more you are going to pay for just about anything.

I use the Spanish Steps in the title because long ago Paola and I were hungry, and we happened to be there. We went to the first place we could find, and had a cinnamon toast and a cup of tea. In today’s value, we paid the equivalent of about $40.00 for 2 cups of tea and a slice of toast.

Stand up!

When you go to a caffe and want to order your espresso, you may have the option of being served at a table, or standing up at the bar. There is often a huge surcharge for sitting at the tables. Again, the closer you are to Tourist Central, the worse this will be.

Shopping

If you have to ask how much something costs, and you are in a touristy area, you a re probably about to be ripped off.

Paola and I were walking in Rome once, and we spotted an Espresso machine that was so ugly, so cheap looking, that as a joke, I walked into the store and pretended to be an American that was interested in it. You have to understand that this thing was horrid, and couldn’t have been worth more than $25. It was the Yugo of Espresso machines. At the time, $150 was extremely expensive for a home Espresso machine. When I asked how much it was, I was quoted $250 , which was, at the time, like saying $1,000 now.

Keep it short

In a loud and crowded environment, if you stick to very few, easy to pronounce words, and you are not dressed with a straw hat and camera hanging on your neck (and that 6 carat diamond on your finger), you might not be recognized as a tourist right away. For example, if you don’t stick out visually, and you walk up to a bar and quickly say in a low voice ‘un caffe’ , instead of the Learn Italian in 7 days version that would be something like ‘Vorrei un caffe’ per favore‘, you probably won’t be noticed until you start fumbling though the Euro change to figure out which coin is which. But by that time, you have your price, and probably were not ripped off.

Off the beaten path

I said this at the beginning, and will say it again. When you get away from the major tourist spots, and find yourself on the road less traveled, these problems just don’t happen. The people are not bombarded by thousands of tourists a day, so you are more of a welcome guest than a quick buck. Italians are extremely hospitable people.