I had the great good fortune to spend at week in Italy at a farm house in Umbria with my wife. Farm house is a mis-nomer, really. It was a villa with lots of bedrooms, all of them with private baths. There was also a large swimming pool. It was heaven. Getting there was not, however, so wonderful.
Rome’s principle international airport was known as Fiumicino, it is now called Leonardo da Vinci. This is important since if you are renting a car the chances are that you will have to return the car and knowing which highway signs to follow can be confusing; The Italian roads are beautifully marked and finding the airport is easier than New York’s Kenny, for example. Finding where to return the car to its rental agency owners is not, however. This has to do with one of the airport’s most outstanding features. The rental desks are located in a central place–a large room, with one entrance.
Afer you complete the rental formalities you need only turn to the left when leaving the rental station, struggle through the people waiting for their companions who are renting cars as they watch their luggage–all of it. The cars are available inside the building! There may be a dozen rental agencies located along a corridor. We were fortunate as our car was shared a building with Hertz so we did not have far to walk with out luggage. I am sure that some of the cars are located some distance from the rental hub. Be sure to ask which building your car is to be returned to. It is easy to overlook this detail and will cause confusion when you return the car. If the highways are clearly marked, the specific entrance you will have to find in order to return your car are not. There are four of them, A,B,C and D (I think.) There are elevators within these garages so lugging the baggage up and down stairs are not a major problem.
We went up to the 4th floor where a woman sitting in a glasses in cage looked at the rental papers we had completed and told us where to find the car we had rented. We took the bags down another floor and found the car. Getting through the process of registering was another story and the reason this blog is being written.
You have cleared Italian customs, spent perhaps 20 minutes trying to find your luggage in one of the largest and most confusing baggage claim I have ever seen with no one to ask for help. So now you have your luggage and you begin to locate and then follow signs to “car rental.” Tubes and escalators, stairways, hallways and people movers, apparently designed by an angry child, eventually lead you to the rental room discussed earlier. The last people mover deposits you in an circular anti-room where all the car rental companies have their desks. In the middle of this area is a large circular column. At the entrance are all the people waiting for the person delegated to complete the paperwork. They are guarding their luggage, strollers and the children that may or may not be sitting in them. You must negotiate your way through the throning crowds and enter the circular chamber where the companies have their counters. Imagine a cattle pen, a circular one, filled with milling, throning, pushing, hot, impatient cattle and you might have a fairly good idea of what this ill conceived arena is like.
Hertz, being Hertz, is located on the left as you enter the space. Above the counter is a digital sign with a number in red, like you may be familiar with this sign from the deli counter at you super market. There was a long line waiting. Since they were in the entrance to the room anyone going to other counters had to push their way through the Hertzies. For whatever reason we took one of the little paper numbers from the machine and discover, much to our pleasure, that the people waiting for Hertz were more than 25 people away from being served. Why pleasure? Because we were not renting from Hertz. Nor were we going to have to wait for National, Budget, Enterprise or any of the other large, well advertised and promoted companies. We had rented on line with a company that gave us a good rate. No, we did not know the name of the rental company the discount service had assigned us to. When we located the desk it was at the end of the room opposite the entrance. We had to run the gauntlet, pushing through the long lines of people mingled with other lines waiting for other counters, other famous rental agencies When we got to the desk of Sixty we discovered two clerks waiting for us! This is the moral of the story: Unless you are a gold or platinum member stay away from the giants if you are renting a car in Rome. Gold Hertz customers go directly to the garage where Hertz has a special check-in counter. For those of us who are not gold card members, well, it hurts.
The trail from claiming our luggage to the car was long. The crowded corridors outside the rental station and the packed room was difficult and irritating. It was clear that the Italian rental companies were less busy than the competition, and the car was first class. I’d do it all again. And hope to.
