Let me tell you something about moving into a city in Italy. It is a scary experience. So here are the photos. Look at them, and tell me if you think my eyes were open or shut during most of this day.
Very scary. All your worldly goods come up the outside of the building on a small (5' by 6') flat platform, with sides that are usually not up. One guy at the bottom on the street, and two guys at the top pulling everything in through a window. And we are talking the third floor, which for Americans, think 5th floor, because the ground floor lobby ceiling is about 18-20 ft. high; the 'piano nobile', where the Countess lives, has ceilings of about 20 ft; which brings us to our floor which has ceilings about 10 ft. high...(originally the servants floor, they didn't get 20 ft. ceilings)...so this works out to about the 5th floor, to my way of thinking. And it seemed even higher when I looked down at that hydraulic platform.
The guy at the top whistles...you can whistle, can't you?...and up comes your stuff.
Sometimes one of the guys at the top runs down the staircase to the street to help with a really big piece, and then runs back up to pull it in through the window.
No one, not anyone, told us...not the realtor in Verona, not the international move coordinator in Seattle, not the shipping company in Naples, not the delivery company in Verona...no one...that staircases are not used. And I asked...'Do you need me to measure the staircases?' No one said 'No, silly, we levitate the stuff up.' Elevators are not used. Everything comes up the outside of the building and in through a window. So, in our naivete, we measured, I drew schematics of the grand 18th century staircase (added in that century to a 14th century building sitting on top of a 10th century 'basement'), measurements of the doors through which we thought our goods would pass. Nope.
No one, not anyone, told us...not the realtor in Verona, not the international move coordinator in Seattle, not the shipping company in Naples, not the delivery company in Verona...no one...that staircases are not used. And I asked...'Do you need me to measure the staircases?' No one said 'No, silly, we levitate the stuff up.' Elevators are not used. Everything comes up the outside of the building and in through a window. So, in our naivete, we measured, I drew schematics of the grand 18th century staircase (added in that century to a 14th century building sitting on top of a 10th century 'basement'), measurements of the doors through which we thought our goods would pass. Nope.
We were left with 287 items, big and small, to place, unpack, put away. And there is no such thing as 'We would be happy to come back in two weeks and pick up all the boxes and packing material, Signora, no problemo.'. No such service. Angel had to pack all the collapsed cartons into pallets, wrap them with twine, and take them to the trash bins in the neighborhood, sometimes after dark. All the packing materials had to go into big black garbage bags. We did pay for some removal; the man who ran the delivery operation had a small business on the side, reselling cartons, so we had to pay him to take them away and then he sold them. Such a deal!
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