Internet cafes in Italy

Getting on-line on the road—Cybercafes and Internet access while traveling

A typical public internet point in an airport; accepts credit cards and cash (U.S. coins, euros, pounds, yen, etc.)Postcards can take up to a week to get home. Sending your jealous friends a quick rundown of what a fantastic vacation you're having via e-mail is instantaneous.

Plus, you can just send it to your own account, bcc everyone you know, and that way you're written a bunch of postcards all at once, plus you have sent yourself an installment of you electronic trip journal.

There are four major types of places where you can get online:

• Cybercafes — A little room, disused office space, rented storefront, corner table in a pub or café, pretty much anywhere an enterprising entrepreneurs can plug in a bunch of computers and hook them up to his DSL connection. That's a Cybercafe.
  
  
  Bring your passport!
  Thanks to an Sistine new Italian "Big Brother" law, you cannot surf the Internet in Italy without registering—every single time you go online—your ID. For tourists, this means your name and passport number.
  
  In order to use a cybercafe, you need to have your passport with you. Even to use one of those automated web kiosks, you must first hold up your passport to its camera so it can snap a shot of the thing and record the info before you're allowed online (see the picture below).
  
  Yes, this is aggravating, but there's nothing to be done for it. » more
  
  
  Access fees can range anywhere from 10¢ per minute to $15 an hour or more, and Internet cafes pop up and disappear with astonishing frequency, so even the resources for tracking them down such as Cybercafes.com, cafe.ecs.net, World66.com, or Cybercaptive.com will not be totally up-to-date.
  
  When in doubt, just ask around (your hotel, the tourist office, fellow travelers). Many now have terminals equipped with a earphone/mic head set for making Skype calls.
  
  
• Your Hotel — Increasingly, hotels have a PC jacked in and available for guest use. Sometimes its free; sometimes it costs a bit (rarely more than a regular Internet café, though). It's always convenient.
  
  
• Public Kiosks — These suck. They're basically like payphones, only with a big screen and a keyboard attached (see the picture above). I have yet to run across one that didn't make 9,600 dial-up speed seem like a dedicated T1 line.
  
  (Once, at a public terminal in a Spanish tourist office where it took 3-5 seconds for each keystroke I made to register on the screen, I swear that, after I was finally finished my short note to an editor and hit "send," a little guy burst out of a door from a back room with a slip of paper in his hand and scurried out of the place headed toward the nearby post office. I still suspect my "e-mail" arrived with a stamp on it.)
  
  The secret to typing an @ in Europe
  
  Foreign keyboards are tricky. The letters are sometimes arranged in a slightly different way, but that's merely annoying (for example, in Italy you'll frequently find yourself inserting an extraneous comma where you meant to type an "m"). What's really frustrating is that, not only is "@" not hovering over the "2" key like you're used to, it sometimes seems impossible to get the keyboard to produce the @ ("at symbol") at all, preventing you from addressing emails or making Twitter shout-outs. Here's the secret: Foreign keyboards have a whole extra function key (alongside familiar Ctrl, Alt, Cmd, Option, etc.) called "Alt Gr." If, as in the example above, the @ appears on a key crowded with three or more options, try holding down "Alt Gr" and hitting it. The elusive @ will magically appear.Sometimes there are just out in public, like pay phones; more often you find them in hubs of public communications, like major post offices, phone offices, airports, and tourist offices. I've even run across them in department stores in Milan.
  
  
• Libraries — The big traveler's secret that no Internet café wants you to know about. Public libraries the world over offer access, for free, and usually to anyone who wanders in (you don't have to have a local library card). Of course, they put you on a time limit, and remember: no loud typing!

Then there are all the ways you can jack in with your own equipment, if you happen to be traveling with a laptop or an advanced handheld. (I have a separate page devoted to finding WiFi hotspots).

Oh, sure, I admit that I practice such things myself—just a few years ago, while driving the back roads of Apulia, I used my Palm and a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone to find a movie theater playing the Italian remake of Groundhog Day. Classic.

However, I also think it will be a sad day when our bodies go on vacation but our minds and our virtual selves remain chained to our lives back home, beholden to the email and spending all our spare time surfing the Web. Speaking of which, please read the first "tip" below.

Tips & links

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