Poste Italiane

Living in Italy is different than living in the United States. The program we are part of encourages us to avoid value judgements - the US is better, Italy is better. Instead, we attempt to not just notice the differences, but to embrace them. For the most part, we have been largely successful at doing this with one glaring exception. The postal system in Italy is really, really bad. There, I said it. Something about Italy is less than perfect and the US has it beat, hands down.

To mail an item from Italy, you really don't want to go to the actual post office. The wait can easily be an hour or more. Instead, you buy your stamps at a tabacchi. The tabacchi sells a wide range of things from official seals and stamps to tobacco products along with prepaid calling cards, bus tickets and everything in between. We even paid our car tax at a tabacchi. The cost of mailing things is high and it is far from clear whether or not anyone actually knows how much it costs to send a piece of mail. If you take the same letter or postcard to 3 different shops, you are likely to end up being told 3 different amounts for postage. It might even be due to the types and denominations of stamps they physically have on hand. It is all extremely mysterious. We have only sent one outgoing package and it did eventually reach its destination, so I must conclude things do function at some level.

To mail an item to Italy from the United States is equally enigmatic. As a former eBay seller, I can state without hesitation that Italy has one of the highest loss rates of any country in the world, rivaling that of China and Russia, a couple of the other worst-in-the-world places to send mail to. The cynic in me suspects that Italian postal workers supplement their livelihood by appropriating anything they are interested in that passes through their hands. After losing 3 out of 4 packages sent to Italy I absolutely refused to do business with customers living in Italy. I couldn't afford the loses that were mounting up when refunds were demanded and I was out both the money and the merchandise. Now that we are living here I can say, if you want to send us a postcard or something of little value in a letter-sized envelope, feel free. It will probably eventually make it to us. If you want to send us a care package, DO NOT DO IT!!!! The one package which was sent to us finally arrived yesterday. The first time it was sent out it was returned as undeliverable by the Italian post office even though it was properly addressed. They might not have even bothered to attempt delivery since we use the school address for mail and someone is always there during mail delivery hours. The box made it through on the second attempt after 11 days and ended up split and open. Fortunately, as far as we can tell, nothing was lost or stolen. The other nastiness is that Italy has seriously clamped down on charging duty and customs fees on anything not originating in the euro region. Students routinely get packages delivered from home which have a declared value of $75 and end up paying a duty/customs fee of 25 euros or more. That is in excess of 50% of the value of the items. In other words, if you see a nice present you want us to have and it costs you $30 dollars to buy and another $25-50 to send to us, when we get it we will likely pay a customs fee of $15 or more which, between postage and fees, more than doubles the original cost of the item. Save us all a headache. Either send us the cash or just tell us about that you were thinking of us. Better yet, buy the item and bring it with you when you come to visit us in Italy!