Camera Bag Incident in Rome - Update

I'm glad it worked out okay, and you seem to have a positive attitude about it. It's great you aren't letting it ruin your trip memories!

We had a great trip and just strike it up as a great lesson for us and for our girls! Never let cute boys become a distraction!! What better lesson could we have?? 😉

Sounds like you handled the incident with good spirits. Sadly though, it's the biggest losses are always the photos themselves and not the equipment, which is replaceable. Here's to your next trip to Rome!

Great it worked out! Hope another part of the lesson is to keep your credit cards on your body (e.g., moneybelt) and not in a bag. :)

Yes to the Money belt for the cards! I had just removed them from the belt to use to go in and purchase our Borghese Gallery tickets and had carelessly slipped them in the back pocket of the bag. Fortunately we had another set of cards to use for the rest of the trip.

janet,

It's great to hear that everything worked out so well and that you were able to find a camera to continue your trip. It's also nice to hear that some arrests have been made, although I'm sure there will be many more scammers and thieves to take the place of those that were arrested.

Thank you for posting this. It's a reminder to everyone not just to be watchful, but also to back up photos daily.

yet another reason for keeping your camera bag securely around your neck

I'm a semi-pro photographer (it's a secondary source of income for me) and I always recommend to everybody AGAINST using camera bags for this exact reason. You're just carrying around a giant sign that says "EXPENSIVE OBJECT INSIDE."

Camera bags are only for storage or transportation, and shouldn't be use while just walking around. If you must utilize a bag of some kind, just use a generic backpack.

Stephen - I couldn't agree more. My camera bag is the Bowery Bag from Ona - it actually is very generic looking, which is why I like it so much. It's a very small messenger style bag (which is more comfortable for me than a back pack) and holds my small, mirrorless camera with a pancake lens and has a padded compartment for the slightly larger zoom lens. I had taken the larger zoom out that morning so only had my camera, a lip balm and a small sunscreen stick in there, along with the credit cards I had dropped in the back pocket temporarily. I was shocked that Sabatini Foto in Rome had the exact model of camera AND the exact (right down to the color) American-made Ona bag. It's a really nice bag - very comfortable and easy to use and does not draw attention to itself.

The bottom line is that if I had simply kept the bag on instead of putting it down to run into the museum to retrieve tickets, I would have avoided the hassle.

Janet -- Thanks for your update. Your positive attitude truly is inspiring, and I'm so impressed that Amex made you 'whole' -- after the wonderful luck that you had finding your exact camera and bag to replace your stolen items. But mainly just overall I want to thank you for your positivity. It's a good lesson/reminder for me.

"I was shocked that Sabatini Foto in Rome had the exact model of camera AND the exact (right down to the color) American-made Ona bag. "

Just popped into my head...was it actually YOUR stolen camera and bag that the store sold you? Sorry to be so cynical, but that coincidence seems suspicious to me.

Well, the idea that my camera and bag were being fenced back to me DID occur to me. But the bag was missing the bit of patina I had put on it (specifically, caffe gelato from Carapina dripped on it a few days before it disappeared). And the bag and camera were both in original packaging (the camera came with a manual in Italian). The folks at Sanatini were very nice. 😊

Cameras are not prime targets of theft and camera bags make excellent purses. Of course you can't set them down on a bench without having them on your shoulder or in your lap. These tend to be thefts of opportunity. Thieves mostly want credit cards, money and phones; small cameras are actually more likely to be stolen than clunky expensive SLRs. Thieves steal what is easy but cameras are not that easy to dispose of and are not usually the goal of thieves. My husband had a pair of glasses stolen in Rome when he put them down on a wall when changing to sunglasses. Opportunity.

I am about to plunk down major cash to upgrade my DSLR before my fall trip and so I can empathize with how horrible it is to lose it with the pictures. We back up our pictures on our computers each night -- but I am also mindful that I am traveling into parts of Europe with lower security this fall, so we are aware that computers might be stolen as well. We are backing up the machines before travel and are taking very old laptops that need to be replaced so that a theft will not be a tragedy. But with the camera, you want the best you can have to get great pictures.

Your solution to return to Rome is excellent.

I know that w/ iPhones your photos are automatically backed up to cloud storage anytime the device is connected to wifi (if that's how you have it setup). This eliminates the need to remember to back up to another device nor worry about losing that backup device. So you could be taking photos one morning and then go into a cafe with wifi and backup your photos. You could in essence, be backing up your photos throughout the day like this. And once those photos are in the cloud, it's there for you to access from anywhere; back at the hotel, back at home, etc. Is cloud backup a feature on any digital cameras (SLR's or point-and-shoot)?

janettomko,

It's unfortunate that you lost all your pictures of Rome, but as you say that provides a good excuse to return. I always travel with a backup P&S camera and duplicate some of the pictures, so even if one Camera or memory card is lost I'll still have something.