Phone Service In Italy

Is your phone unlocked? If so, you can buy a SIM card when you get to Italy and use it in your phone while you are Italy.

FYI, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile don't have cell towers outside the US, either. The reason people with those plans can still use their phones outside the US is that those companies have roaming agreements with mobile companies in other countries e.g. in Italy. Straight Talk simply doesn't allow it (they could).

If your phone is not unlocked, you could also buy a cheap prepaid phone in the US and buy a SIM for that phone when you get to Italy. (Or buy a SIM like the Orange Holiday SIM beforehand.) You can get a cheap Android phone for under $100 on Amazon. (And use it later with Straight Talk if you like.)

There is an authorized TIM store at Terminal 3 arrivals at Rome airport. At the Termini Train station (Rome's main station) there are both TIM and VODAFONE stores.

TIM, VODAFONE, WIND 3, ILIAD, FASTWEB, are the host mobile network operators, then there are also virtual network operators which used the above host networks.

Why don't you buy a cheap GSM unlocked quad phone online before you go? Then you just go to the above stores and buy a one month plan with them. I doubt those stores have cheap options.

Thanks Andrew! Do you mind telling me where I’d buy the SIM card in Italy? Do they sell them at the airport or do I need to look for a store outside the airport? I’ll be hooking up with the tour group at the airport so I don’t know that I’d have a chance to get to a store outside the airport.

“ GSM unlocked quad phone ”
I don’t even know what that is :( Is that just any inexpensive prepaid phone?

There is a wealth of fairly easy to understand info on this very website. Check out https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/phones-tech.

"Quad band" has no meaning anymore since phones these days are LTE at least. There are numerous LTE bands (frequencies) phones can use - providers use different frequencies. E.g. T-Mobile in the US uses LTE bands 2, 4, 12, 66, and 71. In Italy, TIM uses LTE bands 3, 7, and 20. My Android phone can use all three of those (as can any modern smart phone - except for some of the cheap budget phones) so I know my phone will work in Italy. If you post the exact make/model of your phone, maybe we can figure out which LTE bands it supports.

A bit of clarification on phones....

In the "old days" (relatively speaking), most cellular phones were equipped with two frequency bands to operate in North America (800 & 1900 MHz?) and two bands for operating in Europe and the rest of the world (900 & 1800 MHz?). These days that's no longer much of a concern as current phones are provided with a number of different bands that operate on LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 5G. There are some frequency band variations between phones sold on different networks and phones sold in Europe and elsewhere, in accordance with the regulatory framework of the areas they operate.

Straight Talk Cellular is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) and doesn't actually operate its own cellular towers or infrastructure. Straight Talk buys network access from all three of the large US networks - AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

As a previous reply mentioned, No North American cell networks (or any others) operate cell towers in Europe or anywhere else. In order to allow customers to operate phones in Europe or elsewhere, each cell network establishes roaming agreements with existing carriers in those areas, via the GSM Association.

Since your existing phone is not capable of operating in Europe, you have several choices.....

• Buy a phone when you arrive in Rome. Rather than buy at the airport, you might wait until you arrive at Roma Termini station. There's a large shopping mall one floor down from the tracks and as I recall there are several mobile phone shops there. There may be a few kiosks at track level also.
• Buy a SIM-unlocked phone and then purchase a SIM card when you arrive in Italy. If you do a search for "Unlocked Phones", you'll get lots of choices, including Amazon, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Staples, Costco and others. Most of the phones seem to be Android models, so if your present phone uses the same OS, there shouldn't be much of a learning curve.
• Buy a travel phone and/or SIM from a firm such as https://www.onesimcard.com/ or https://travelsim.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpo_Gmdrf_QIVbCStBh3gvQHuEAAYASAAEgKCvfD_BwE .
• A number of people on this forum really like Google Fi, which apparently operates very inexpensively even in Europe - https://fi.google.com/about/ . You might want to check that out too.

You may find this helpful - https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/phones-tech/cell-phone-europe .

These days I always travel with my usual iPhone and use the roaming plan provided by my home cell network. It works very well, although it's not cheap! One advantage I've found with that approach is that the phone chooses the strongest signal, so as I travel about during the day, I may actually roam onto several different networks. If using a SIM with one network, you're stuck with the coverage provided by that network.

Good luck sorting this out.