I went to Italy for 16 days in the early summer of 2024 with the love of my life and her family. We visited Belluno, Losego, Venice, Salzano, the Dolomites via La Poza, Verona, and Milan.
One of the most surprising things I learned while visiting Italy was pizzas are not sliced. I looked around the restaurant we chose for our first dinner and saw everyone sawing through pizza with butter knives!
Photos of unsliced pizzas
The reason for this silliness is to prevent the pizza from cooling down. Italians bring food to the table as soon as it is ready, and do not hold dishes under a lamp so they can be served all at the same time.
We learned the cheat code
If you say the pizza is to share, they slice it! It’s not as if they do not have pizza slicers in the back. They do, and they’ll use them if you say every pizza will be shared among the table.
Before we learned the workaround, I bought and carried small scissors to restaurants. Here’s a photo that I’ve been told is very embarrassing to people who love me. Cutting pizza with a butter knife is embarrassing!
This post is part of a series I wrote at the end of a 16-day trip to Italy in June 2024. Find all the posts about my trip here.
I bought bidet attachments for my toilets during the pandemic. Not because there was a paper shortage, but because the reviews were great.
I went to Europe and used a few standalone, European bidets. I was not impressed. They required me to use more paper than I would with no bidet! You have to get up and move from one seat to another. Surprisingly, the $110 Tushy toilet seat attachment I’m using now is better than anything I saw in Italy. The United States truly is the greatest country in the world.
I was traveling with some non-bidet users, so I found instructions to help us where the first two steps are “1. Use the toilet” and “2. Locate and sit on the bidet.” https://toiletseek.com/stand-alone-bidet-how-use-pros-cons/
You want me to get up and move? No thanks.
This post is part of a series I wrote at the end of a 16-day trip to Italy in June 2024. Find all the posts about my trip here.
My phone provider is Ting. Ting is an MVNO, which is a cellular service reseller. They offer pay-as-you-go services on Verizon and T-Mobile. I live and work on wifi most days, so by not paying Verizon directly for unlimited minutes, texts, and data, I save money. My phone bill is usually less than $50 a month. Sometimes it’s less than 40.
Phone service is important, especially when traveling. I have a Verizon SIM in a Google Pixel 5, and Ting support told me this SIM card would not work at all in Italy.
Ting is willing to send customers SIMs to switch between Verizon and T-Mobile, but using a T-Mobile SIM in Italy would incur international roaming charges. It was recommended that I obtain a SIM from an Italian provider after I arrived.
After landing at the Milan Airport/MXP, I found a kiosk with signs in English that said “get your SIM card here”. I paid $56 with a Visa card for a SIM card from Wind Tre. It provided 70 gigs of data, and 300 minutes. No texts. After changing to the Wind Tre SIM, my phone obtained a local Italian phone number. There was a 30 minute delay between the time the SIM was inserted and when I received some welcome text messages. Wind Tre offers an app that allowed me to monitor my data usage, and I only used 3 gigs during a 16 day trip. All of the places we stayed offered wifi.
Screenshot of Settings > Network & Internet > SIMs > WINDTRE on a Google Pixel 5
Messaging apps on my phone like Signal and WhatsApp worked uninterrupted during and after using the European SIM card.
When I put my Ting SIM card back in the device at the end of the trip, I received every text message I had missed all at once. I had to reboot my phone twice before I could place an outgoing call.
Make sure services you plan to use during the trip that have two-factor authentication enabled are not using text messages to authenticate. You will not get these text messages if your phone number changes. Before swapping SIMs, change logins to these services to use an authentication app instead of texts.
This post is part of a series I wrote at the end of a 16-day trip to Italy in June 2024. Find all the posts about my trip here.
