by Suzanne Feinberg

Created on: May 02, 2008

My husband and I landed at Rome's Fiumicino Airport, after a long tarmac delay but short flight from London's Heathrow. It was the last of four stops on our European adventure, and although we were weary by this point in our two-week journey, we were eager to explore the Eternal City.

We planned for this trip for months and were very proud of our ability to pack using just one small suitcase for each of us. Granted we knew that European flight protocol prohibited us from carrying even our small bags onto the plane, since we also had hand luggage, but we felt the lighter we packed, the less schlepping would be involved.

We maneuvered off of the plane and to the baggage claim area, a little anxious to discover whether our bags made the journey with us. As my husband pulled his bag off of the belt, my mind began to race, planning how I could make it through the remaining four days of our trip with just the clothes on my back.

Finally, my bag crawled along the conveyor belt, and my husband reached down to grab it. We immediately noticed the large outer pocket of the suitcase had been shredded and was dangling by a few threads, whatever contents (probably just an umbrella and a rain jacket) lost to the luggage gods.

We walked around the baggage claim area, looking to show someone from British Airways what happened. Although we could not locate anything branded with the British Airways logo, we found what looked like a generic "baggage information" desk. We showed the employee our bag, and he typed some notes into the computer system and directed us, in broken English with a hand gesture, over to another desk.

An American tourist just trying to be helpful pointed to the bum bag and said, "You know your bag is hanging open."

I smiled and nodded, thinking to myself, "Um, yes. I noticed. Thanks."

By this point, the area had cleared of most passengers who already had claimed their wholesome luggage, and here we were, traipsing from one counter to another. We became acutely aware of the lack of air conditioning in the airport in the July heat, and we began to feel irritated. We didn't even really care about the bag; we just wanted to get on with our trip.

And then, through the haze of humidity that had developed, we noticed a nicely dressed airport attendant wheeling a brand new piece of luggage our way. "Could this be for us?" we thought. Certainly not, the way our airport luck had been going with cancelled flights and the like.

"Here you go," she said. "This is a new replacement bag, courtesy of British Airways."

"Grazie, grazie!" we exclaimed, in our most gracious Italian accents.

To our disbelief, we had just reported the situation and moments later found ourselves walking out with a brand new suitcase! Granted this made maneuvering onto the train into Rome a bit more difficult, now that we had three pieces of luggage, instead of the two small bags which we carefully had packed.

So our Roman airport experience turned out to be molto magnifico.

The moral of the story: Ask, and you just might receive, even in an airport overseas.

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