Does anyone have recent experience with buying a SIM within Italy, so that we might learn the exact cost of minutes calling back to the States, or from one cellphone to another within Italy? From searching the net, it appears that the SIM cards purchased outside Italy, in the US, have some kind of extra initial fees built in at purchase, as well as per-call charges on top of the per-minute rates. I've already searched this forum, and haven't found the detail I'm hoping for. Thanks.

Here's the info on the TIM website.

http://www.privati.tim.it/aree_eng/3...0,,269,00.html

sorry - looks like they don't show costs.

This link has more info about getting a SIM card from TIM.

http://www.privati.tim.it/aree_eng/4/8/tim/0,,8,00.html

you can dig around to try and find rates.

There are TIM offices all over Italy. When you're actually looking for one they seem like they are hard to find, but the minute you stop looking they seem to pop up everywhere.

This worked for us. Charges were what they stated. Product arrived on time. Support was easy to reach while we were in Italy.
http://www.rebelfone.com/Europe_simcards.aspx?couId=55

this does not have prices either, but I found it a very useful breakdown of my options:
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g1....In.Italy.html

I bought a prepaid SIM card from a TIM store (in Parma) in September. It worked fine in my unlocked GSM phone that I brought with me from home. It cost about $12 as I seem to recall, which included a certain amount of minutes. I was required to show my passport at the TIM store (they photocopied it) but otherwise it was easy and quick. (I used my phone in Croatia and Slovenia and quickly used up my minutes with the steep roaming charges, though - much cheaper in Italy.)

Here's a tip if you want to be able to chat with people back home on your phone cheaply: setup a Local Phone account (localphone.com ). This is a forwarding service that will give you a US phone number people can call to reach an international number. If someone in the states has free long distance (like most cell phones do), they can call for free; you pay the per-minute charge to Local Phone (the cost varies by the country and costs more for cell phones).

When I was in Italy, I used my TIM phone/prepaid SIM which had free incoming calls(!) with my Local Phone account - so the phone itself was free to use for an incoming call as long as I wanted. I think it was about 15 cents/minute for Local Phone. Note that you can setup multiple forwarding numbers on your Local Phone account - so if will be at a certain hotel that has a phone in room and can receive calls, setup a forwarding number for that - and Local Phone forwarding to a landline is much cheaper (like 3 cents/minute vs. 15 cents/minute) than to a mobile phone.

I noticed a number of cell-phone-in-Italy threads on the Slow Travel forums recently. Here's one of them: the thread discusses all sorts of cell phone options...

http://slowtalk.com/groupee/forums/a...85/m/576106867

On the thread, the poster Fibonacci says "Go to this site http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/italy.html to see the choice of Wireless services and their different prices and special deals. The nice fellows that run that site are in Florence and have always responded (in English) to my emails about cellphones in Italy."