Day One, Tight Connection and the Most Inscrutable Airport = JFK

As American travelers, on their virgin transatlantic trip we expected to encounter nightmare scenarios at foreign airports.  As is turned out, the most nightmarishly inscrutable and poorly organized airport that we encountered the entire trip was not in Europe at all but right here in the US, the infamous JFK or Kennedy International in NYC.  Delta gave us just 70 minutes to manage a connection to Alitalia, on the other side of the airport, admonishing us that if we checked  baggage, we would have to pick it up at the Delta carousel schlep all the way to Alitalia, re-check it and go through security again.  Luckily, we were able to carry on, which we did.  But still almost missed our flight.

The trip for the domestic Delta gate at Kennedy is not insignificant and anything but intuitive.  After taking a shuttle, an elevator, leaving a building, crossing a poorly marked crosswalk to another building with no signs or gate monitors anywhere in sight along the way we finally, after asking a random security guardx made our way to the Alitalia desk where we were told that we would not make our flight as "boarding has concluded".

Needless to say, if we had checked baggage, we would have missed our flight by an hour or more.

When I protested vehemently, in true Italian fashion, the burly flight office admonished me to calm down but called the gate, whose staff sent a flight attendant down who escorted us through security all the while reassuring us that we would indeed make the flight after all.

From that moment on, we were, in my view, in Italy and enjoying our first taste of amazing Italian hospitality and warmth.

I sat next to a sweet young family who spoke mostly Italian and, by the time we took off was already saying, Grazie and Prego myself.

I know Alitalia gets a bad rap as a poorly run government owned airline but so far, in my mind, Alitalia Rocks!