Vatican post office simply saintly

Here, where the pope sends religious messages and statues of saints stand against the sky, Dimitri Auerilio comes regularly for a strictly secular reason: to send his mail.

The 109-acre Vatican, walled in against an Italy of labor strife, strikes, long lines, late trains and a maddeningly unreliable postal system, has developed a mail service over the years that is the envy of Italians. It is both fast and safe, Auerilio said, describing it as a beacon of bureaucratic success in a landscape of ineffective infrastructures.

"And I can say that because I know the Italian system," Auerilio, a 48-year-old compensation-board worker, said on a recent day, echoing the thoughts of many of his countrymen who come here regularly to drop off their mail, with no Hail Marys necessary.

"The Italian state of mind is not to work so hard, and you can really see this in its post office," he added. "Instead, the Vatican post office is really good. They are efficient. They get things done."

Tourists, as well as the Romans, are in on the secret, although most probably flock to this orderly, sovereign religious state enclosed in roiling Rome to send their postcards with papal stamps from the seat of Catholicism.

As a result, more letters are sent each year, per inhabitant, from the Vatican's 00120 postal code than from anywhere else in the world 7,200, compared with about 660 in the United States or 109 in Italy, said Juliana Nel, a spokeswoman for the Universal Postal Union, a U.N. agency based in Bern, Switzerland.

She called the Vatican's service "probably one of the best postal systems in the world."

When asked about the Vatican's postal efficiency versus their own, officials at the Italian postal service shrugged off the comparison, saying the Vatican operation was too small to be taken seriously. Italy sent out 3.6 billion pieces of mail last year, while the Vatican dispatched about 6 million international mail items, mostly postcards, in 2002, the most recent statistics available.

Italian officials released figures showing that their on-time delivery rates are rising, but the sorry state of the Italian postal system is legendary, so much so that some Italians can still be seen crossing themselves before tossing their mail into an Italian letter box.

"They have to change their methods," Federico Santi, 24, the manager of a construction company, said outside the post office on Via Monterone in Rome, adding that people are losing business because of delays.

The legends tell of how in a postal strike some years ago, overstuffed post offices put their parcels on trains that simply wandered, full, up and down Italy. Instances of mail arriving a quarter-century late abound.

Officials at the Vatican declined to speak about their mail system.

But Rosy, a woman who has worked for 13 years at a stamp-selling booth in one of its four postal branches, said the system's modest size helped, but its methods helped get the job done, too.

"When the letters are sent here, they are on the plane that very night," said Rosy, who glanced nervously over her shoulder and declined to provide her last name. "They are where they need to be the next day."

But across Rome, and at the Vatican, people of all stripes spoke freely about the two systems. "Mother superior tells us to come here to do our mailing," said Lucy Carrara, a nun who lives outside Rome, standing on the black cobblestones outside the St. Peter's Basilica, after sending a package to Jerusalem.

The hook for Miguel Chaveria is that he works for the Vatican information service. Four years ago, he said, before the Italian system started to improve, he told his family to send magazines from Spain to his Vatican address, instead of his home in Rome, "where I'm always surprised when things arrive."

In addition to the speed and security, tourists behold the postmark's little smudge of ink as a kind of blessing, like ashes on a forehead. Bruno Fusser stopped the other day to send a card to his family in Bruhl, Germany. "For my mother, it will be something, like, holy," he said.

Back on the streets of Rome, the experience at a post office is anything but ethereal, said Santi, the construction manager.

"When I was little, my parents told me, `The post office is a place where you need to have a lot of patience,'" he said. "The people working there are always talking, taking bathroom breaks or hitting their frozen computers."

He paused, put his right hand to his temple to simulate a gun, and said, "It's enough to make you want to kill yourself."