A few days before my wife and I departed on our first trip to Italy, I visited my Aunt Sara, who had been there years before. We talked about the beauty of the countryside, the culture, the food. After we hugged and I headed for the door, she added an afterthought in a completely different vein:
“Watch out for the pickpockets.”
Yes, I was warned. No, it didn’t make any difference.
Having your wallet pinched in a foreign land, as mine was in Rome recently, is an infuriating, disorienting experience. I felt so helpless, thousands of miles from home, unable to even remember which credit cards I was carrying. Or how much cash I had. Or whether my Social Security number was on anything. Or whether I had the receipts for my traveler’s checks. It all made me wish I had read those dull pages in the guidebook that dealt with security precautions — or had at least better heeded Aunt Sara’s advice.
You might think that frequent travelers like those of us in the media would be wise to the occasional dangers of overseas trips. Not always. Even the most experienced travelers get victimized. In fact, I was the third reporter in my department at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to be pickpocketed in Italy last year.
One writer, on assignment at the Vatican, ducked into the bookstore and bent over to examine some titles, her purse slung over her shoulder. When she went to check out, her pocketbook was open and her wallet missing. This, where the pope blesses the flock!
Another staffer, a fashion writer, traveled to Milan to cover the spring shows. When he arrived, sleepless and foggy-headed, he took his eyes off his luggage for half a minute to deal with a clerk at a currency exchange. In an instant, a leather bag containing his camera, silver pens and other valuables vanished like yesterday’s hemlines.
And now me, a middle-aged innocent abroad. Let me tell you what happened — and, in an accompanying story, how to guard against such calamities. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
It was our first day in the Eternal City. Pam and I had managed perhaps two hours of sleep on the overnight flight from Atlanta and were addled with fatigue and excitement. We checked into our hotel near the Colosseum, took a short nap and then roused ourselves so as not to waste a minute of precious daylight.
I read that one of the best ways to fend off street crime on vacation is to blend in with the locals. That was hard for me to do in Rome, since I am neither dark nor handsome, do not smoke, do not have a cell phone appended to my skull and do not wear tailored black suits and expensive leather loafers when I am about to walk 10 miles on cobblestones. I fear that we looked like 100 percent prime USDA-inspected tourist meat as we left the hotel — Pam with her camera bag, me with my cargo pants, ballcap and windbreaker with a deep zippered pocket outside the left breast. I put a lot of faith in that pocket. Having been cautioned about sticky-fingered lowlife, I prudently slipped my wallet next to my heart instead of carrying it on my hip.
We drifted toward the Colosseum with the rest of the pilgrims and came to a set of steps marred by graffiti and trash. Vendors and beggars clogged the sidewalk. There was no other way to go. I reflexively patted my breast pocket — inadvertently showing where my wallet was — and prepared to run the rapids.
The turbulence hit immediately. A straggly haired woman cradling a baby confronted us from the left, sticking out a palm and imploring, “Bambino, bambino.” We veered away and steered into another woman waving a publication of some sort. I shook my head no. She grabbed my right wrist. I flung my forearm away. Two distractions in 10 seconds: more than enough opportunity for a pair of good pickpockets to work their mischief.
As we scampered down the steps, I was thinking to myself that these were the most aggressive panhandlers I had ever encountered. Then we turned out of the stairwell and caught our first full view of the Colosseum. The beggars and peddlers were instantly forgotten.
We strolled around the Colosseum and the Roman Forum for a couple of hours. At one point, outside the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, we watched as a white-haired man slapped at his hip and cursed an urchin who had been nipping at his heels: “Get your damn hand out of my pocket!” I didn’t think to check my pocket. Vestal virgins, indeed.
We didn’t discover that we had been violated until we stopped for coffee on the way back to the hotel. I ordered a latte and fished for my wallet. The pocket was unzipped and empty. The beggar with the baby, the woman who gripped my wrist — I suddenly understood that I had been tag-teamed.
We held out a dim hope that I had left the wallet in our room. We hurried back to the hotel and turned our belongings inside out. Nothing. It was time for damage control.
The hotel manager, an amiable young man named Luca, kept a tiny apartment down the hall from our room. He came to the door barefooted and listened sympathetically as we spun our tale of woe. He invited us in and set a phone on the table so we could start canceling credit cards.
“This happens all the time,” Luca consoled us. “It is the Gypsies.”
We heard this across Italy whenever we mentioned that I had been pickpocketed. “Gypsies,” waiters and desk clerks would spit as their eyes narrowed, and then proceed to tell their own horror stories.It seems that every street crime in Italy is blamed on Gypsies.
Canceling cards wasn’t as easy as I had imagined. One of the first rules of charge cards is to keep a separate record of account numbers and theft-reporting lines. I had those records — back in Atlanta. In Italy, I was clueless. I wasn’t even certain which cards I was carrying. For the next 90 minutes, we worked the phone, blocking our long-distance card, canceling our MasterCard, reporting the stolen traveler’s checks.
Visa was the toughest. Pam didn’t have a copy of that card in her wallet, so we had no idea what the toll-free number was. Nor did I know which bank had issued the card. We reached a Visa rep in England, who gamely phoned banks in Missouri, Maryland and Massachusetts in search of our line of credit. She even patched me through to Equifax, the credit bureau in Atlanta, whose representative wasn’t able to find our account, but did tell me it was raining back home.
After 30 minutes, Visa finally located the issuing bank in Delaware and blocked the card. That raised a new problem: What were we going to use to make purchases during the remaining 13 days of our vacation? Fortunately, Pam had brought our ATM debit card, which I had left behind. Thus, we had accidentally followed one of the cardinal rules of secure travel: Divide your assets.
As we were thanking Luca for his help, I decided that we ought to make one more call, to the U.S. Embassy. We should have called there first. The duty officer had every phone number we had spent more than an hour scrambling to find. He also had some welcome words of counsel.
“Don’t feel too bad,” he told me. “These pickpockets are very good. Try to enjoy the rest of your trip. It could have been worse.”
He was right. We didn’t lose our passports or airplane tickets, which can be very time-consuming to replace. We were out perhaps $300 in cash, but we still had a live charge card. And no one had physically harmed us, which is what foreigners fear most about visiting the gun-happy United States.
The duty officer suggested that we report the theft to the Rome police in case one of the credit card companies wanted to see proof of the crime. Next morning, we visited the closest station and were directed to a bilingual desk clerk in the Aliens Department. The officious young woman handed me an incident report to fill out in English. I was lucky in this regard. My newspaper colleagues tell me that they recited the facts to cops who took it all down in Italian and then asked them to sign a statement, never mind that they couldn’t understand a sentence of it. At least I knew what I was signing.
When I finished, I handed the statement to the clerk and she gave me another, blank copy of the form.
“Write it again,” she said.
“Scusi?” I replied, using one of the few non-menu Italian words I knew.
That’s what I said; what I was thinking was: Do I look like Bartleby the Scrivener? Use a copying machine. I’m sure the Rome police have them. I mean, Olivetti makes the damn things.
“Again,” she instructed, and I schlepped back to my hard plastic seat and did as I was told.
I completed the duplicate and gave it back to the clerk, who summoned an officer. He listened as she translated and then he asked me, in broken English, to show him what had happened. Act it out. Right here.
So I cradled an imaginary baby and stuck out a palm and bleated, “Bambino, bambino,” and grabbed my wrist and jostled myself and unzipped my breast pocket and — abracadabra! — conjured an air wallet.
“Hmmm,” the cop said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Gypsies.”
It was comforting to know that Sherlock Holmes was on the case.
No one said anything else to us, so we sat back down and awaited further instructions. Ten minutes passed. I got up and asked the clerk if she needed anything further.
“It is finished,” she said, shooing us away with her hands. “Go now.”
Aside from its undeniable entertainment value, the morning had not been a meaningless exercise in paperwork. Later that day, when we stopped by the American Express office at the Spanish Steps, the first thing the teller wanted to see before replacing our traveler’s checks was a police report. The duty officer at the embassy knew what he was talking about; it pays to have documentation.
For the rest of the trip, we enjoyed Italy quite nicely with one charge card and one driver’s license, which we needed to rent a car in Tuscany. When we returned home, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for several years now: I bought a wallet.
An inexpensive one.
