Baby, You can drive my car

A friend recently brought her newborn baby over from the U.S.  I took one look at the stroller – and I knew she had bought it there – it’s the SUV of baby strollers.  Suped up, ready for action – with the seat doubling as a car seat you just pull right out and strap into your car.  All in very elegant fabric, like the inside of a Cadillac.  Except it had the Italian label – Chicco – on it.

Of course. No wonder it was elegant, too.  She said, aside from the fact that her (very) Italian husband would never have ‘bought American’, it turns out that that model – is the Armani of baby strollers (I shoulda figured). Until very very recently, the strollers here looked like they came straight out of a 1940s reel of Mary Poppins.  Whenever my sister came to visit with her 4 kids, they would get stopped constantly – with all the mammas just oohing and ahhhhhing…

Not over the rather large brood (a family of 6 in Italy is hard to come across), or the cutie-pies in the bunch…No, the mammas all wanted to talk strollers.  So, one would think that this stroller could have been purchased here, in its mother country, so to speak.

Turns out, it was so over-the-top, they don’t even sell it in Italy. 

America, land of hyper-convenience had the ‘built-in-baby car seat’ on their deluxe model.  Why they don’t carry it in Italy, when it seems just as good of a market is beyond me. 

The Chicco 'Cortina' Baby Stroller
- not available in Cortina -

But on second thought, that might just be for two reasons: 

       1.    Mammas don’t leave their house with their piccolo  bambino until they’re too big to fit in a car seat or

       2.    Italians prefer the ‘Mamma-wraps-her-arms-around-the-baby-just-like-a-seatbelt-while-sitting-in-the-front-seat-with-bambina mia’ version of car seats.  

      It would seem that Italians still don’t divorce much,  because they still need someone to drive the car.