NO MORE WHEELIE CASES IN VENICE? SUITS ME
If I could justify forking out between €300 and €400 for a small suitcase, then I’d buy one of those sleek Rimowa types. You know the ones – in a lovely range of subtle colours from silver to bottle green to burnt orange to burgundy, and all of them with the German manufacturer’s distinctive grooved design. They simply ooze class.
What I use as a carry-on bag is a perfectly acceptable 10-year-old Samsonite which has served me well to the Seychelles and Seville, to Morocco and Mumbai. It’s not one of those shiny, hardshelled, light-as-a-feather Samsonites (the husband got his mitts on one of those recently) but rather an oldfashioned soft case which has stood the test of time and has never let me down with stuck zips or the like.
When did suitcases become such a minefield, though? It used to be very straightforward back in the day and, I know some younger readers will find this hard to believe, they didn’t even have wheels.
Now, however, apart from all the super-sleek, gossamerlight types with swizzling wheels and oh-so-trendy interiors, there is a new kid due to arrive on the suitcase block. Take a bow the Trunkster, the case with the ‘sexy silhouette, impeccable construction and intelligent features’. The brainchild of two New York designers, the Trunkster will come in two sizes and will cost
even more than my wishlist Rimowa when it hits the shops next summer.
So what’s so special about it? Well, it doesn’t have zips for a start. Instead the front of the case has a sliding cover that glides up and down at the touch of a button – a bit like one of those roll-over garage doors. Made from aluminium, it is extremely light, has a built-in digital weighing scales in the handle and a battery charger. A GPS tracking device is an optional extra at around €50.
The Trunkster fol- lows a number of ‘quirky’ cases in recent times – the Bluesmart, for example, which you can track via your smartphone. And then there’s the suitcase that turns into a chair. (Honest!)
Meanwhile, my immediate dilemma is not working out how I can afford the Rimowa – nor am I exactly waiting with bated breath for the arrival of the Trunkster. No, what I am concerned about are my ongoing sojourns in Venice because its city council ruled last week that, from next May, suitcases with wheels will be banned from the streets of the lagoon city on the grounds of noise and disruption to the locals.
I can understand this point of view. In a city without traffic where the only sounds you encounter are lapping water, church bells, the horn that sounds to warn of acqua alta (high tide) and the occasional blast of a horn from an irate waterbus driver, suitcases trundling through the streets, day and night, are an abomination. This is a city, after all, that accommodates 25 million tourists a year. That’s a lot of noisy wheels.
Fines are to be imposed from next year on those who break the wheelie rule. The only acceptable wheels will be the soft, pneumatic version – quiet rubber ones in other words, ie not the sort on most suitcases.
So, with all those wheelies banned from La Serenissima, and bearing in mind those 25 million tourists, there must be a market out there to produce Venice-friendly wheelies. Maybe I could testdrive one next year. For the Rimowa people.