.........Next I will talk about COMMERCE, PRODUCTS & SERVICES in Italy but first, enjoy this view from the TOP of the famous SPANISH STEPS, of the street and piazza below. You can see the same view from on top of the Pincio hill, where there is an enormous and beautiful park we visited. If you click on the photo to blow it up, you can see more clearly just how crowded the streets are with tourists. You can even see PEOPLE inside the windows of the pink building!

.....Here is one view of the TIBER RIVER which runs through Rome, dividing it in half. I'm disappointed that my other photo of it (a totally different and better view) got somehow deleted after I uploaded it (par for the course, here!) :-( ---Later we crossed the river to Trastevere again, which is just one of several residential areas of Rome where I lived in the 1970's. I remember passing and crossing the Tiber River many times on foot and by bus, on my way to the various jobs I held there for 3 years. I may have mentioned elsewhere that those jobs included teaching English to various students young and old, (including a family of missionaries and a pilot for Alitalia Airlines), fashion modeling for a clothing store, and child care, both live-in and live-out. Most of these jobs paid very little, like $1.00 to $2.00 per hour. After all, it was the early 1970's!

...COMMERCE, PRODUCTS & SERVICES




........PRODUCE MARKETS are plentiful in Rome and all Italian cities, and we found the QUALITY to be excellent and always very colorful. However, you can't always buy the QUANTITY you want. One example: I wanted to buy a small bunch of big red juicy "Globe" grapes (my favorite) to snack on while we walked, (Blood sugar running low!) but the seller wouldn't separate/break the huge bunches he had, which were enormous, way too much for me. Not too accommodating. .......but customer accommodation is not a feature of many of these outdoor markets (MORE about that later!) There was no one else selling this variety of grapes there, but later at another market, I did find what I was looking for.

.......SUPERMARKETS: Usually at the BIG SUPERMARKETS in Italy it is much easier to get what you want and how you want it, so we checked those out too quite a few times, and we all found them much more to our liking. (Didn't think to get pictures of them though!) That's because they were too much like our own modern supermarkets, but it was a nice feeling at times to feel so much "at home". The supermarkets in Italy were one of the BEST examples I saw of modern convenience and practicality in a country that often is lacking in this area. I was really impressed with the system they have of having the customer weigh produce themselves AND apply the correct price sticker, after it came out of a little machine in the produce department. I've never seen this in any American supermarket, though I suppose it may exist somewhere - it's a BIG country!

....LABELS & STICKER SHOCK!....Italy employs the same system we do of electronic product scanning at the largest stores. One interesting difference I found was that most Italian packaged food products have the WEIGHT listed on the BACK of the product, while the weight in our country is stated on the FRONT of the package. In addition, the nutritional information of some food products in Italy was not divulged on the label, though for most of them it was. These are small details, but I've always been a very detail-oriented person - as you can probably tell!! But the biggest "detail" I noticed was how very similar the stores & supermarkets are in both our countries, only the language, products and prices change....with a BIG emphasis on "PRICES", because we noticed that everything in general cost considerably more in Italy. Clothing, shoes, boots, home appliances, (to name a few) prices were out of this world!

Sonia checked out all the shops for a pair of leather boots in the style she preferred, and the least expensive of those she could find were well over $200 - and UP. My husband pointed out something he spotted too - a popular brand-name food mixer which costs approx. $200 HERE in the USA, was advertised (same mixer, same brand) in Italy for $1,200 - 6 times more!!! We purchased very little this trip to bring home, because even Italian 'liquore' (which Settimio appreciates) like Sambuca wasn't worth buying, especially with the dollar to euro exchange ratio. When it came to Italian prices, we were NOT 'happy campers!'

..........COMPUTERS & SATELLITE TELEVISION: Two other modern conveniences Italy shares with the USA, of course, are their COMPUTERS & SATELLITE TV, with an impressive 200 channels enjoyed by some! ( I'm happy with one-tenth those channels, and don't need all that *nudity* we saw on late night television either via Satellite ). I always knew that Europe in general has far fewer restrictions on showing full frontal nudity on regular programming, and Italy is no exception. Everyone has a T.V. set there, of course, but we learned that many fewer Italians own computers compared to the USA. Many of our own relatives in Italy of OUR generation don't own computers, and a few others just purchased them very recently for the first time. I'm always "shocked" when I hear someone doesn't own or even want one, but that's because nowadays so many of us ARE either dependent on or addicted to computers.

Also, computers and virtually ALL electronic devices and machines cost a great deal MORE in Italy, than in America, especially imported products. Luckily at Romana's house in Nettuno, BOTH communication services were installed, though, always being on the go, we sure didn't have much time to surf the web or watch Satellite TV. But the T.V. set was usually on during meal times and I was finally able to get some news about those horrible wild fires that ravaged California during that time and destroyed so much!!.....very bad, sad news indeed!

........HEATING, AIR CONDITIONING, ELECTRICITY, TELEPHONE, GASOLINE: As an Italian mobster or Wise-Guy would say, "Forget about it!!" LOL Not that they're cheap commodities in America either....but for example, even though Italy uses a different electric power system (220 volts, instead of 110 volts we use) and their type of electricity costs LESS than ours, for some reason their electric & heating bills are SO astronomical that many or most Italians don't heat their electric water tanks continuously. They only turn them on when needed, and when that hot water runs out --- well you're out of luck until the water tank heats the water up again, IF you turn it on again. When I lived in Italy way back when, and rented a room by the month, I had to pay extra every single day for taking a shower, and the hot water would barely last thru the shower before turning cold. It's the same system today in many homes and apartments in Italy, and I was surprised that things hadn't changed in this regard.

...NOW WE'RE BOTH PUZZLED....One thing my husband has always been perplexed about is WHY, in such a modern country as America, its big city streets are lined with ugly electric and telephone poles and lines. In Italy the lines are UNDERGROUND in the cities - thus invisible. I told him I don't know the reason but I assume the lines are exposed in the USA for ease of reaching them for repair, and because it's a lot of work to bury them. But then he further pointed out that IT'S BECAUSE THEIR ABOVE GROUND that they so often NEED REPAIR! (Due to bad weather or accidents involving them, for example). And he just may well be right -- this time! : -)

When it comes to AIR CONDITIONING, most homes in Italy today STILL don't have it (except the rich). It would be very expensive to run. In business establishments, like shops, air conditioning is also much less common than in America, and in the 1970's didn't exist at all. Even far fewer CARS in Italy have air-conditioning, compared to the U.S, where virtually ALL cars have it. (Though lots of Italian drivers DO have modern navigational systems installed in their cars.) Most Italians drive manual transmission cars, not automatics. Thus, automatic transmissions are harder to obtain (more scarce) in rental vehicles, and cost considerably more to rent. They are too greatly in demand by Americans....WE should know because we rented one and got out of the deal just in the nick of time, when we found out how much gasoline cost to drive it!! That's when we decided to take the TRAIN to Venice & back instead, which all things considered, was a much better deal!! (We took a fast train, the EURO STAR, which got us from Rome to Venice in 6 hours.) Gasoline prices in Italy in October 2007 were about 1.38 Euros per liter, or between $7 and $8 PER GALLON. And if things don't start improving with OUR energy crisis pretty soon, OUR fuel costs might end up there too!!

As for TELEPHONE SERVICE----well that has always been very costly in Italy, where long distance charges applied (per minute) even WITHIN THE SAME CITY (At least 3 decades ago in Rome when I lived there, so you can bet I didn't linger on the phone!). That may have changed now or rather, become irrelevant with the advent of CELL PHONES, and cell phones, just like all over the world, are EVERYWHERE in Italy. We noticed that everyone had one, even the most shabbily dressed foreign vendors selling flowers and umbrellas to tourists.