The delivery card: getting couriers to a house with no address
Half the houses outside town here have no street number — the address on paper is a località and a road, which means nothing to a driver in a van. What works is a short set of directions in Italian, given the way a local would give them. Fill this in once, keep it in your notes, paste it into every checkout.
Why Italian, not English. The driver on the last leg is usually a local subcontractor working through a phone screen. A sentence he can read at a glance, with a landmark and a kilometre marker, is the difference between a delivery and an "address not found".
Paste this into the address field
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Send this to the driver on WhatsApp
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Five things that actually help
Answer the phone from unknown numbers on delivery days. Most failed deliveries here are failed phone calls.
Share a WhatsApp pin the moment the driver rings. One tap beats any description.
Put your surname on the gate, visible from a moving car. This also matters for the residency check.
Use a neighbour as fallback — name them in the note, in Italian, with permission.
For anything valuable, use a pickup point. A short drive beats three failed attempts and a depot in Sassari.
This is the kind of thing Nino sends
A short brief every morning: your comune, the island, and the rules that affect you — in English, Polish or German.