Great tips from an author who lives in Italy
You checked your passport three times. You remembered the good shoes.
You still forgot these.
I live in Italy. I know exactly what is missing from your suitcase right now — because I watch tourists discover it the hard way every single week.
THE ITALY-SPECIFIC ADAPTER
Not a European adapter. An Italy-specific one.
Italy has a socket called Type L — three round pins in a straight horizontal line. It is unique to Italy. You will not find it anywhere else in Europe. The standard two-pin European adapter you used in France or Spain last year does not fit it.
Most tourists only discover this when they arrive at midnight in an apartment where every socket on the wall is recessed Type L and nothing they brought fits. Then they hunt for a hardware store in a city they do not know.
Buy an adapter that says “Type L” or “Italy” on the packaging before you leave. Bring two. (James will provide a handful of these adaptors for sharing but supply is not infinite.)
THE MOSQUITO REPELLENT
Nobody puts this on a packing list. Nobody.
Italian cities — not countryside, not wetlands, cities — have tiger mosquitoes. Small, black with white stripes, and they bite during the day. Through your clothing. While you are sitting at a terrace restaurant in Florence eating the best meal of your life. You will not feel them until you wake up the next morning covered in welts that are bigger, itchier, and longer-lasting than anything you have experienced at home.
They are worst June through September. Florence is particularly bad. Rome has them. They breed in any standing water — a flower pot, a puddle, the drainage grate on the street outside your Airbnb.
Italian pharmacies sell repellent but at €8–12 for a small bottle. A travel-size DEET or icaridin repellent from home costs almost nothing and takes up no space. Apply it every evening before you go out.
If your accommodation has no window screens — and many Italian apartments do not — buy a plug-in mosquito device at any supermarket when you arrive. The brand is called Vape. It costs €3. Run it overnight. This one item will save you more physical misery than anything else on this list.
YOUR OWN MEDICATION
Italian pharmacies are excellent. The pharmacist is a qualified professional. But the products are completely different and you will not recognise any of the names.
Pepto-Bismol does not exist in Italy — the active ingredient is not available here. Your Tylenol is called Tachipirina. Your Advil is Moment or Nurofen. Cold medicine, allergy tablets, stomach remedies — all different names, smaller pack sizes, and higher prices than at home.
Getting what you actually need across a language barrier at 11pm when you feel unwell is genuinely difficult. Pack the basics before you leave: your preferred painkiller, something for stomach problems, allergy medication if you use it, cold medicine. They weigh almost nothing.
For prescription medication: original labeled bottles, generic drug name written down. Italian pharmacists do not recognise US brand names.
A SCARF
Not for warmth. For churches.
Italy’s most extraordinary buildings are its churches. You cannot enter most of them with bare shoulders or shorts above the knee. Guards turn tourists away at the door of the Vatican, the Duomo in Milan, San Marco in Venice, and hundreds of churches across the country every single day. No exceptions. No arguments.
A lightweight scarf weighs nothing. It folds to the size of your fist. It takes three seconds to drape over your shoulders. It costs you zero churches and zero dignity on the steps.
If you forget it, the vendors outside major churches know exactly what happened and price the replacement accordingly.
A REUSABLE WATER BOTTLE
Every Italian city has free public drinking water. Rome has over 2,500 free fountains — cold, clean, tested continuously, running 24 hours a day. Florence has its fontanelle. Milan, Venice, Naples — all have public water points.
Tourists who do not know this spend €3–4 per bottle all day in summer heat. A family of four loses €60 a day on something that is free on every street corner.
A collapsible bottle weighs almost nothing. Fill it at the fountain outside your hotel before you leave in the morning. Refill it every time you pass a spigot on the street — which in Rome means every five to ten minutes.
This is not a sustainability lecture. It is a €60-a-day saving that takes up no space in your bag.
A PORTABLE PHONE CHARGER
You will use your phone more intensively in Italy than anywhere else you have ever been. Google Maps from the moment you step outside. Photos of every ceiling, every piazza, every plate of food. Museum opening times, train platforms, restaurant addresses. Translation. Reviews.
Your phone will be dead by 3pm. In a city you do not know, with no data and no map, at the moment you are supposed to find the restaurant you booked three weeks ago.
A portable charger fixes this entirely. It fits in any bag. Charge it overnight. Use it all day. It costs less than one tourist-area bottle of water per day on a week-long trip.
SPF 50 SUNSCREEN
The Mediterranean UV index is high even in months that do not feel like summer. April. October. A cool overcast morning that turns bright by noon.
Pompeii is completely exposed. The Roman Forum is completely exposed. The Amalfi Coast road is completely exposed. You will spend hours outside every day with no shade and no warning that you needed it.
The tourists buying emergency sunglasses from the vendor outside the Colosseum in April were not expecting to need them either.
Pack SPF 50. Apply it from day one. The Italian pharmacies carry excellent sunscreen but at higher prices than at home. Bring yours.