FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Italy logistics/accomodation with a 4-year old and luggage
Old Feb 11, 2019, 3:10 am
  #22  
GUWonder
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Originally Posted by Perche
Agree, but I can make it so that I'm 100% sure I'm not going to lose my wallet by pickpocketing in Italy. I'm not sure I can say that I'm 100% sure I won't lose my wallet in the USA, because it's easier to keep a non-violent pickpocket person away from my well secured stuff, than to fight off a guy who wants my wallet and is pointing a gun at me. Fear factor of getting robbed goes way down when I am in Italy. Only once was I tried to be mugged near Rome Termini by 4-5 teens. I knew they wouldn't be armed, so I basically shooed then away. Once in Matera, Basilicata I lost my wallet. My own fault. The hotel owner asked if if called he police. I said of course not. Imagine calling the police in NYC or SF to say you lost your wallet. They're not going to start a manhunt. The hotel owner called the police, and sure enough, they had it. Not a credit card or euro missing, and it was a two mile walk from where I lost it. I asked the police for his name so I could send him a bottle of wine or some type of gift, but they didn't give it to me because they said he didn't want any reward. That's not going to happen in any American city.

It's such a disservice to constantly potray Italians as thieves, crooks, rip-off artists, and pickpockets. Maybe the secret service agents who are assigned to go a week ahead of the President's trip somewhere should stay out of bars, not get drunk, and avoid bordellos. They are not losing so many guns from street pick pockets.
Crime isn't a reason to stay in the US instead of to visit or live in Italy -- with or without kids. And no one here is portraying Italians as being all that which you mentioned in the third to last sentence above. But even the Italian police know about the pickpocket operations being a major problem, and that is part of the reason why they are sometimes very good about grabbing some of the pickpockets with all the stolen belongings still on them. The street pickpockets in Italy and other parts of Europe generally don't want guns, as that would more substantially risk eating into their business of being pickpockets amongst other things.

I have seen wallets and purses returned in major US cities with everything that was thought to be in them at the time of being lost. And in NYC, I've know a person's whose very valuable wedding ring went missing and was recovered and turned into the police -- that too by a homeless person. And that ring was then worth more than most people's new cars in the city. So the notion that something would never happen in a US city that happened in Italy doesn't really seem all that compelling to me.

The real disservice in this thread is to constantly portray Roma as thieves, crooks, rip-off artists, and pickpockets; and yet, except for myself, no one else here has yet seemed to take issue with that stereotype.
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