Oh crap I can’t BELIEVE what a lousy job I did with pix today!!!
Anyway… days ago lovely Air Italia eventually emailed they had miraculously discovered our lost bag… Sam tried to engage them by email but they eventually stopped responding.
Taking an educated guess, we decided to finally hunt down the Air Italia lost & found… hah guess what blouse Sam was still wearing 😂
So, it’s a story…. first off, how do we get there? What do we find once we are there? How do we get back? Better conference-call in Franz Kafka, seriously.
To get to the airport, we hire the official driver of our AirBnB lol he’s a good guy, but the English is a little iffy. One death-defying ride later, we arrive at the Napoli airport, now it should be easy: all we have to do is find the Lost & Found, simple! Our driver says he will wait.
The airport is confusing, obviously… but we somehow manage to discover the Lost & Found, down a slim dimly-lit hallway, and we find ourselves faced with this:
This is literally the window you “communicate” through! Hah you can see Sam’s white blouse in the reflection 😀
So yeah, you arrive here, you hopelessly try to peer through, and of course see nothing…
To recap: this is literally the Lost & Found window. And of course, nothing is ever—ever!!—“lost” by the fault of the airline!! Bags are just vaguely “lost,” in the most passive use of the word imaginable: they ephemerally, mysteriously, somehow become lost.
In the Napoli airport, at the end of the day, if you are lucky, you will stumble across this insane dystopian Lost & Found portal. Second test: if you can decipher the tiny sign to the right, it advises you to push the button, once! Only once!
We do so, just the once, and after a bit a speaker buzzes “ZZZZFJANDK SS AAZZZEEDJJ”
This is useful.
Sam shouts “LOST LUGGAGE!!”
In reply, we get “U ZZZZD SJSU BLUE LINE SJSJDJJSJ GO TO END ZKSJSJSJSJSSJ TEN MINUTES!!” And it switches off, they obviously have more important things to get to other than lost luggage.
We exchange nervous glances—we kinda knew this would be futile but we’ve already sunk an insane taxi ride to get here—-dang it I forgot to even detail all that hell lol—-but we do really want our luggage back: I love this bag too much to admit defeat by friggin Air Italia of all things!!!
So we retreat from the horrifying 1984 blank screen, and we do finally find a blue line! It immediately leads us past doors marked Staff Only. In a high security area, one wouldn’t normally just walk through Staff Only doors. So what do you do? We decided to follow the freaking blue line through all sorts of places we shouldn’t be allowed into.
I took a pic in this area and was immediately remonstrated and had to prove I deleted the pic right then and there, so sorry for no visual record.
Eventually the blue line came to an end, just ahead of internal security, where flight staff etc came in and out. The sinister unseen voice at the “window” had said we were to wait about ten minutes… Sam first noticed the clock at about six minutes to go 😂 Eventually others showed up, none too sure they were supposed to be here either: it was all so confusing!!
We stood around uncomfortably while zillions of airport staff came in and out, everyone with a lanyard to open the gates… we began to fidget, starting again to doubt we’re even in the right place… several others show up and after fifteen more minutes they are mysteriously let through. Of course no one speaks English.
Now our “ten minute” wait is up to forty minutes—and we still have a freaking taxi driver outside waiting on us!!—and a few other unfortunates have now joined us, and we all still stand there expectantly… FINALLY a person saunters up mentioning something about “lost and found?”
The most recent person to arrive, in typical Italian fashion, bulls his way forward to plead his case—only to be knocked aside by Sam pushing HER way to the front: no no no!!! “We were here first,” omg I haven’t seen BullRoarer Sam in a while!! It was quite an epic moment!!
The gate-keeping Italians were at a bit of a loss as to what to do, they finally allowed three people into the hallowed inner sanctum of Lost Luggage. Obviously there was security first, an x-ray machine, passports to be examined, tricky questions to be answered. I was glowered at, and then sternly told to remain behind.
So there went Sam, behind enemy lines: I took a quick pic of her and was again immediately discovered: accusing fingers all pointing at me! A senior security guy came forth: however, he was very forgiving, he simply said “would you please delete the picture you just took?” It was harder to imagine a politer request, so I showed him my phone, he watched me delete the pic, and we were all fine.
Obviously I knew I could retrieve a deleted pic; obviously *he* knew the same; this charade made me even more nervous for some reason but I choose to believe they were just being nice, nobody wants trouble, and it’s all so dumb anyway.
Half an hour later, I am still loitering around pointlessly at the end of the mysterious blue line, and a new angry security guy grunts incomprehensibly at me: I guess his meaning is “what am I doing here?”
I try to say my wife—mi espousa—all kinds of words haha, is in there: he glares again, says “wait by main exit now!”
WTF is the “main exit”?? I have no idea, but for sure it isn’t here, so I follow the blue line back into the main Napoli airport—which is freaking huge BTW—and I see a man that I had stood in line with earlier walking away with luggage! And there goes the other guy too!!
But no sign of Sam. And again for a while… still no sign of her. Grasping at straws by now, I decide to go off airplane mode… and I immediately get a text— from TWENTY MINUTES AGO!! The text read simply, “I have it.” But where is she?? Maybe she has been waiting on me outside with our driver for half an hour??
I start pacing a much larger circuit at this point, looking and looking; eventually I get a follow-up text: “should be almost out.”
Oh brother I had been shitting my pants for nothing, she was simply stuck in ridiculous Italian bureaucracy this whole time! I should have guessed… anyway, to make a long story short (as if!!) she survived the insane Italian nonsense, she had recovered our beloved Hartman bag, we met up with our long-suffering driver, and he agreed to just drop us off at a decent lunch place in town!!
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