Smile while I rip you off


Out in the small Tuscan towns, even the ones that are basically tourist traps, people are generally nice and extremely honest with strangers.

Florence, however, is a different story. The areas outside the city center - where real people live - are fine, as friendly as you could wish for, but the closer you get to the Duomo, the more you have to watch for scams. Most of them are either obvious or dumb - the guy at the bar who tried to charge me for a coffee I didn't have (dumb, since you're required to give customers a bill with everything listed), the vendors who sell paper cut up dolls that supposedly dance (a hidden string helps, though of course they fail to mention that).

For the most part, the restaurants in the tourist areas are pretty upfront about how they're ripping you off - a pizza for one can cost 10 Euros ($16), and a plate of spaghetti's in the same neighborhood. That's pretty much how it is near any tourist attraction, worldwide. Truth is, the real problem is the exchange rate; a year and a half ago the price - adjusting for the location, of course - wouldn't have seemed outrageous at all. And usually, the tourist-oriented food in Italy is still fairly decent, more than the equivalent of what you'd get at a similar venue in NYC. Or at least I think so; I try to avoid obvious tourist traps in my hometown.

I generally avoid them in Italy, as well, but in this case I had to stop for lunch at a little dump of a place called Donnini Pasticceria, which translates roughly as "Eat here only if you're an imbecile, which is how the staff will treat you."

The place gave dumps the world over a bad name. The pizza appeared to have been cooked the day before Julius Cesar was assassinated; the spaghetti was in his lunch box when he spit on Brutus. The uni-sex restroom - common in Italy - wasn't clean enough to puke in.

No biggie, even if the prices were absurdly high. I could have lived with it all had the waiter-hawker-maitre de above, who after taking the bill came back with my change and said rather confidentially, "You know, the tips are never included in Italy."

Now that's almost true - tips and charges for service are rarely added to the bill in restaurants frequented by Italians. But in tourist areas especially, many restaurants add both a cover charge and, very occasionally, a service charge as well. Techincially, the cover charge is usually listed as a charge for bread, per person, and appears that way on the bill. 2 Euros is pretty common. I don't know if that's to get around some obscure Italian law or established custom. One custom I do know that's very established is tipping - as a rule, Italians don't. And they don't feel bad about it either. (Tourists are often semi-expected to leave about a ten percent tip; if you're with Italians, though, they'll generally talk you out of it as bad form.)

But I digress.

As I said, some restaurants in tourist areas charge for both - and they even say they do. As this one did, right on its menu. So obviously my friend thought I couldn't read, English or Italian.

I neglected to tip him. An oversight, surely.

But what the hey. I guess he didn't hold a grudge, because the next day he smiled when I returned with a camera to take his picture ... next to the sign that said service was included in the bill...

The moral of the story: steal from me if you must, but don't treat me like a complete imbecile when you do it. A run of the mill fool will do.