Ciao Tutti
Just ran into a neat little trick (does everybody already know this?)
Usually the telephone meter (contascatti) at your rental is not that accurate! If you are paying your hosts so much per message unit (scatto)(usually £200-400) you can check it out by dialing " *40# " (without the quotes) and a computer voice will either give you the meter reading or the amount used since the last billing period. So, when you arrive, and before you make any calls check the reading .... when you leave do it again and you will have an accurate number for the calls you made during your stay.
Now if someone could tell me how many scatto a two minute call from Siena to Rome would be, I would be a happy puppy.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kim,

Hi Steve! We have used this for phones in Italy and it works well. Some vacation rentals just do it this way instead of having those little machines. Phone calls to Rome are not that expensive. We do lots of them for getting online (which I assume is what you will be doing) and we have never paid more than say $20 for a week. But we do all our email offline - so it was usually just quick calls.

On this trip I am thinking I might just go to an internet caffe when I want to work on this message board because you need to be online the whole time. I guess I could go online, look at all the pages and have them in the cache, then go offline and read them all while offline, compose answers in Word, then go online and just do the replies quickly pasting them in from Word. Or I could just got to an Internet caffe.

So your mission should you decide to accept it, Steve, is to call that number and get your total, make a 5 minute Internet call to Rome, then call the number again and make a note of the cost. Let us know!!