When flying into Fiumicino..

..Be prepared to have your luggage lost!

These are not lucky days for travelers that use the Fiumicino Airport. In fact it has already been several weeks since a real chaos started in the 'bagagge claim department'. At today's date thousands and thousands of Italians - and most likely also foreigners- have lost their luggage after having departed or landed in Fiumicino, the main airport of the Capital that serves every day around 100,000 people.
Government is investigating, but currently the mystery has remain unsolved. If you are about to arrive to Rome by plane, then, the best thing you can do is to gather accurate and updated information of the baggage question in Rome, before taking your flight. In case of loss, in fact, the procedure to recuperate your luggage is not at all easy, and you might, at the end, not even have it returned to you and receive instead -possibly -a mere compensation of 200 euros (as for what concerns Alitalia's flights).
Furthermore, if you happen to loose your luggage when on an Alitalia flight, after landing and having done all the necessary formalities (loss declaration at the airport), the airline will give you two numbers to call to verify if your luggage has been found or not. You can call the first number for the first 5 days, this is a local phone number, not expensive to call, but after 5 days, you will need to call the number 199.137.811 (Baggage assistance of Alitalia's Customer Care), which, please note, it's very expensive to call: 11.88 eurocent each minute of call, including the time you are waiting for them to answer, which - as it happened to a friend of mine that has recently lost her luggage these days- can be very long: around ten days calling the 199 number just to be able to speak to somebody (and 25 euros spent in calls).
What happens if you don't call? Your luggage might never been returned to you, your file will be abandoned by Alitalia and your luggage is destined to be sold in an auction (you won't even get the revenue from this, though!).
Remember also to keep the receipts of the expenses you incur due to the loss of your luggage, as those can be reimbursed, if you provide Alitalia with a series of other documents in original: baggage receipts, a letter in which you ask them for the reimboursment and a declaration of loss made to Alitalia at the moment you landed, which have all to be sent to Alitalia with a registered letter (in Italian: "raccomandata") with a return receipt (which can prove you wrote them). The worse thing in all this is that once again Italian companies -like Alitalia- show us how badly they treat their Customers, with an assistance that can only be reached by spending an unfair amount of money!