Phoning home just got easier and it's Cheap!
Either I'm dense and just tumbling to this option... or it really is new. You chose. What matters is that post offices in Italy can be tricky, funny hours, long lines - so getting a phone card there (see below) has a tiny degree of difficulty.
NOW you can get the same thing in any Tabacchi. They are always easy to find and open much better hours, not as as likely to have lines.
You go in and say "una carta telefonica -16 internazionale per piacere" and say how much you want to pay. Start with a five euro. You won't hardly be able to use it up in a trip. Over two hours of cheap talk. I think they want to know if it is for cell phone or land line as I recall. If you are using it for cell phone just wave that around to make that point clear to them.
You hand over your five euro, they give you a scrap of paper that looks somewhat like a used lottery ticket and you just dive in. All instructions are obvious and in English and Italian. Could not work easier, cheaper or better.
Phoning home from Italy
This is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Cheap phone calls FROM Italy TO anyplace outside of Italy. Works for cell phone, pay phones, land phones. For a two week tourist or a full time resident.
And it's all done via the Post Office? Strange, but true. Go into any posta in Italy and ask for the Carta Telefonica Internazionale. Costs five euros. They hand you a card, you turn it over and all the instructions are right there. Basically you dial a special toll free number, and then instructions come on in English and Italian, but you can quickly get it all in English at the push of a button, then you dial in your card's specific number. It is under a scratch off black box at the bottom right. And then you dial the actual number you want to talk to OUTSIDE of Italy.
The other nice thing about this is that at the beginning of that phone call, it tells you in English how much time this particular card has available in pre-paid time to talk to that number you just dialed.
When I first got this card, I immediately called from Umbria to Maine and had close to two and a half hours available - for 5 euros. Not a bad trick!
