30% Fewer in Italy : Americans on Mediterranean Tours Wary

Pat Burnell, an American tourist with a camera strapped around her neck and a fistful of guidebooks for the Sistine Chapel, was admittedly nervous Thursday.

This trip, from Hyrum, Utah, to view the art of Europe had been planned for a year--”for all my life, really”--but the events of the last three days, the middle-aged American said, were giving her serious pause.

“I haven’t talked to my family back in Utah for days,” she said. “I’m going to have to call them tonight, and I’m afraid they are going to insist for me to come home.”

Burnell, a recent resident of Lawndale, Calif., decided to take this European tour by herself. She has already been to the Louvre in Paris and the Prado in Madrid and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. But Italy, particularly Rome and Florence, were to be the high points of the trip.

“Now I don’t know,” she said. “I was traveling by myself, but I decided to join a group because I felt afraid.”

She had come to see the Sistine Chapel, with its magnificent Michelangelo ceiling, on a huge tourist bus, only 50% full. Aboard, she said, were about a dozen Americans and a larger group of German tourists. “All the Americans,” she said, “are a little apprehensive.”

The concern expressed by Burnell about recent terrorist actions in Europe and possible retaliatory moves for the U.S. air attack on Libya seems to be shared by many Americans traveling throughout the Mediterranean these days.

Italian tourist officials say there are far fewer Americans here than is normal at this time of year--a drop estimated at 30%, at the least; tourism officials elsewhere in Europe report similar declines. And those who have decided to follow through with long-anticipated travel plans are doing so with a sense of wariness unusual in Americans traveling abroad.

European Hostility

Some Americans indicate they are as worried about hostile European reaction to the U.S. bombing of Libya as they are about the possibility of a random airport bomb or terrorist attack.

Several Americans interviewed Thursday speculated about whether anti-American demonstrations in Florence, organized by Communist students, was typical of the Italian reaction to the American action.

“I’ve been worrying about the Italian reaction,” said Arlene Gingrass of Ridgefield, Conn., “because their government did not support us.” Gingrass and her companion, Richard Bettigole, arrived from New York Thursday morning on an “almost empty Pan Am flight.”

At Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, scene of a Dec. 27 terrorist attack that left 16 people dead, Bettigole said he was aware of vigilant security guards, but said he thought the customs officers were lax and that “anyone could have brought a machine gun in his suitcase.”

Security officers would dispute that claim, but it illustrates the heightened American awareness of terrorism in Europe.

Costly to Europe

For the European tourist industry, the American awareness of the possible dangers abroad is bringing home severe economic costs.

“The situation with American tourists coming to Europe is very critical,” said Franco Paloscia, spokesman for the Italian National Tourist Board. He said American tourism, which brought $6.6 billion to Europe last year, was down 30% to 40% so far this year.

Paloscia said the decline was particularly dispiriting to the Italians, who had spent $3.3 million promoting Italy to American tour operators last year. He said his agency was prepared to spend another $4.6 million on promotion, but the campaign would have to wait “until a more realistic time--we hope next year . . . after the present psychosis of terrorism and bombs has passed. We expect the Americans back, as Italy’s tourist attractions are still intact and untouched by the political events of the outside world.”

It’s not the tourist attractions, of course, that worry American visitors, but the airplanes, airport terminals and other public places that have been frequent targets of terrorists.

U.S. Warns Tourists

Warnings from the U.S. government accentuate the concern. On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Geneva warned Americans to take seriously Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi’s threats against U.S. interests and suggested that Americans avoid public places known to be frequented by tourists.

“We believe,” the embassy statement said, “that (Kadafi) will not distinguish between official U.S. installations and those in the private sector. Would-be terrorists will find particularly attractive those public places--restaurants, airline terminals and cultural events--frequented by Americans.”

In this atmosphere, every anonymous threat and bomb hoax has chilling implications and adds to the general sense of unease among travelers.

At the same time that Burnell, the tourist from Utah, was expressing her worries at the Sistine Chapel, a telephoned bomb threat at the American Express office sent scores of police cars wailing through the streets to the Piazza di Spagna, spreading alarm and confusion among the tourists and teen-agers idling on the nearby Spanish Steps.

Threat a Hoax

The bomb threat turned out to be a hoax, although the American Express office was evacuated and alarm mounted when a suitcase--which turned out to be a telephone repairman’s tool kit--was discovered by officers searching the building.

Several hours later, the U.S. Embassy in Rome reported that an anonymous caller reported a bomb aboard a charter aircraft carrying 50 American tourists from Vienna to Rome. The aircraft landed at Rome’s Ciampino Airport without incident.

Many American tourists here say they are trying to avoid American airline companies, figuring they are safer on other international carriers. Trans World Airlines decided this week to cancel the Cairo-to-Athens-to-Rome flight that was struck by terrorists April 2, when a bomb placed beneath a seat killed four American travelers.

A TWA spokesman in New York said the flight, a once-popular shuttle, was taken off the schedule “because of very poor bookings.” TWA said it was assumed that fear of terrorism was the primary cause for the low bookings on the flight.

Guide’s Prospects Poor

Enzo Manzione, a Rome tour guide, said that group tour bookings for his organization had declined by 60% for April and May alone, and prospects for the summer, he said, “do not look good, unless the situation clears up quickly.”

Sandro Pilo and Paolo Inaburri, two carriage drivers who between them have 58 years of experience working among the tourist crowds at the Spanish Steps, were equally glum Thursday as they considered the approaching summer’s business.

“The Americans stopped coming after Fiumicino,” said Inaburri, 67, referring to the terrorist attack last December. “We feel it first, right here.”

He shrugged. “Kadafi is matto-- crazy. And Italy, it is always in the middle.”