It’s called the Deposito Bagagli which means luggage storage, although a novice Italian speaker might think it means Deposit Bags. And deposit your bags, you can. Retrieving them, however, is not so easy. To say that seems to suggest that depositing them IS easy and it isn’t.
Roma Termini, the main railway station, was quiet at 8 o’clock on Monday morning when we arrived. We had three hours before our train to Vicenza and wanted to wander around, have coffee and hopefully find the porchetta man at his shop so we could take a porchetta panino on the train for lunch.
We didn’t want to drag our cases over the cobblestoned streets hence our visit to the Deposito Bagagli office which we found had been moved to the ground floor of the station saving everyone the tedious task of going up and down the long flight of stairs to the deep basement when the one lift was out of order or just too slow for the queues of people.
The office was empty and we breezed in to leave our bags. It was so easy. We just want to leave these 3 bags for 2 hours. But no. We didn’t have a ticket. So, I ran back to the machine and took a ticket so that we could be served. The ticket dispenser is the type with which we’ve all become familiar at banks and government offices like Medicare. There were three choices – deposit luggage, retrieve luggage, or express service (which costs more but I recommend you pay the extra). We produced our passports and left our bags.
That first coffee in Italy is sublime. The smell and the taste remind us that the long trip from Perth is worth it. If you add a small cornetto con crema – it’s actually uplifting. All of the shops were closed as they are throughout most of Italy on Monday morning. Sadly the porchetta shop was also closed so no delicious panino for us.
We wandered. We reminisced indulgently commenting on every fountain and monument that we passed and the special memory associated with it. And there are so many. We headed back to the Deposito Bagagli in what seemed heaps of time. When we arrived we found a long line of people in front of us. I bypassed them and went to the counter as they were all obviously here to leave their luggage. I was told to take a ticket and join the line. This is all happening in Italian, so I said that we were here to collect the luggage. No matter. Line. There. Take ticket. Rob was in the line – sensibly – by this time and had made a new friend from Sorrento, the suburb next to ours at home. His son went to St Mark’s school. Meanwhile I took a ticket which started with R – for ritiro. The other tickets started with C and that’s a mystery to us.
The interesting difference between this ticket machine and the ones we know from the bank, is that the numbers weren’t called. The numbers showed up on the large screen above the counter showing which counter is serving which number. The person next in the queue, regardless of number, presented their ticket and the person at the counter then put it up. So, it would appear that no number was necessary. There was only one counter with two people attending it, and there was only one queue for people depositing and retrieving their luggage. We waited for our R number to be called but it wasn’t.
Post Ferragosto, late summer lethargy had settled over the workers who were flustered – they flapped their arms, and ignored questions and fluttered in the direction of the single, growing line of bewildered people. For 20 minutes we waited amid the chaos; we beseeched; we argued; and I helped several people who didn’t understand the system. I recommended the Express system although there wasn’t an express desk.
With 20 minutes remaining before our train left, the sleepy-eyed clerk brought out the wrong luggage for us and so we had to wait another 10 minutes while the dumb waiter went up and down a few times to the storage area below. Meanwhile, he avoided us. None of them made eye contact with any of the waiting people. We made the train with only minutes to spare and wished we didn’t have any luggage as there was no room for it on the train. It’s August. It’s hot. Rome is on holiday and the people left to work are feeling the heat!