Originally Posted by
roknroll
Calling the Italy number for Alitalia might work better, I think that's what my parents used to choose their seats last year. You might also want to search in the Alitalia forum since it's an AZ flight and they are the ones running the show. You booked with DL, but that's about the end of DL's involvement. Everything from here on out is controlled by AZ. Even if DL were to assign you seats over the phone, I would not trust that they will stick until confirmed directly with AZ.
Thanks to all for the input. I tried the Italian office and the rep spoke no English (and I don't speak Italian!), so that didn't work, and then tried the US number again and got a rep who was as rude as he was unhelpful.
I called back Delta a second time and got an amazing rep who said she wanted to see this through, escalated the issue to a supervisor and then escalated again to some sort of joint Skyteam desk for issues like this. They solved the problem and assigned the seats we wanted. I then called AZ just to confirm on their end. Posting this update in case anyone else has this issue with AZ seats on a Delta award, Delta was far more helpful than AZ even though it is an AZ flight.