Any advice for bringing home those precious peices of local artwork, plates ,vases etc.
Any little tricks that you may have.

Bubble Wrap

Bring your own bubble wrap to add to the stuff they give you when you buy it - and if they don't give it to you, ask, they often have it but only wrap pieces in it if you ask. Then wrap that in your clothes and put all breakable pieces in your carry on. Bring a small tote (collapsable, in your bag on the way over) to put your bulky things (shoes) and the rest of your dirty laundry in and check it for the return flight. Never put breakable stuff in checked luggage, even if it's well wrapped.

A friend of mine takes a plastic food storage container for packing small breakables on the way home. If it's not needed for breakables, it can always be stuffed with underwear and miscellaneous easily lost items.

I purchased bubble wrap in Florence, after I bought several Vietri pieces at an open air market in Montepulciano; the same Vietri dishes I had paid a fortune for in Denver; . I bubble wrapped plates and chargers and inserted them here and there within our dirty clothes in our suitcases and not one piece got broken....
The dishes were seconds and I paid almost nothing for them so I was willing to take a chance; next time, I will line the bottom of my suitcases with a few sheets of bubble wrap just in case; although there are shipping stores everywhere now, it was annoying to waste an hour tracking down a source for bubble wrap in Florence then walking over there to get it.

Hi Mitch,

Where did you find the bubble wrap?

My friend didn't take home artwork....but she took home several bottles of wine in her checked luggage.

She wrapped each one in newspaper, then bubble wrap, then dirty clothes, and stuffed them into her most packed suitcase, so they would have plenty of padding. Each bottle made it just fine, no cracks, no breakage, and most importantly, no wine soaked clothes!

You can easily take bubble wrap with you (unrolled and folded flat, if that will fit better in your suitcase), and also different size ziplock bags to put smaller things into, so that if they do break, hopefully all the pieces will be contained in the bags.

How do you say "bubble wrap" in Italian?

http://ets.freetranslation.com/
gives "la bolla avvolge", but I wouldn't trust.

Suggest you bring a small piece to show a shp clerk.

Good idea, ira.

Ira, in cross-referencing your freetranslation.com with Babelfish, bubble wrap comes up as "involucro della bolla."
You're right, it's a good idea to take along a little piece!

My wife makes and collects porcelain dolls and we have shipped at least a dozen back from Europe and the UK. Some of the dolls were shipped by the place of purchase and some were shipped by us. None of the dolls have arrived with the slightest damage. Luck may have a little to do with that, but our intuition of when to trust the shop and when to do it ourselves may also have played a role.

We always double box everything we ship. After wrapping the doll's head, arms, legs and other porcelain parts in bubble wrap (some of which we bring from home), we arrange the doll in the inner box with plenty of bubble wrap, newspaper, styrofoam pieces (we have been known to fish chunks out of the hotel garbage dumpster- please don't tell anyone), and whatever else is light, soft and bulky. The idea is to keep any part of the doll from resting against the side of the box. Once the inner box is ready to mail, we then put that box inside of a larger box and pad the inner box with bubble wrap, newspaper, and so on. A lot of trouble, but it is effective.

We always have sissors in our medical kit. Don't worry about tape, you can find it there, but be sure to use wide cloth or nylon type tape. Finding bubble wrap is another story. Unless it is bought in bulk quantities, bubble wrap can be very difficult to find in parts of Europe. I base this on our inability to find it and comments that people have made when we inquired about it. One surprising source that we have found is our hotel staff. On at least four occasions, we have been given bubble wrap by people working the desk at our hotel. Just one more reason to be friendly to them.

They have Mailbox type stores in Florence ; places that ship and also sell office supplies and shipping supplies....

You can buy bubble wrap at the Mail Boxes etc. store in Florence ( there are severl locations) I've shipped many things home through them , nothing has ever arrived broken.It's well worth the peace of mind to my to have M.E. ship things home.
Fluffy

We just asked the shopkeeper to wrap our pieces up and told them we would be taking them on the plane. On occasion, we just asked them to put more bubble wrap on.

Definiteley take your purchases on the plane if at all possible. I am still having "discussions" with a shipper about an excessive shipping charge

If you got it at a decent store, if you tell them you're taking it overseas they will put it in a wooden box and your ceramic piece will be in bubble wrap inside the box. You can then put it in your luggage. Good luck!

If you buy a ceramic tray, be prepared to have to unwrap it when your carry-on goes through x-ray. Has happened to me a couple of times--the long edge of the tray sometimes looks like a blade on the x-ray machine. So bring some tape along in your carryon to retape any items that have to be unwrapped.