ROME — Gary Pellston, a 54-year-old regional sales manager from Dayton, Ohio, concluded a nine-day family vacation to Italy on Tuesday having seen the Colosseum only as “a really solid example of load-bearing arches” and having entered, by his own count, eleven hardware stores.

“You want to know a country, you go where people actually buy washers,” said Pellston, holding a bag of Italian cable ties he described as “honestly better than ours.” “Anyone can stand in front of a fountain. I stood in front of a wall of 3/4-inch brass fittings in Florence, and I learned something about these people.”

Pellston’s wife, Denise, said the itinerary she spent four months building collapsed on the first morning, when her husband paused outside a ferramenta near the hotel and said, “Two minutes.”

“That was a forty-minute two minutes,” she said from a bench outside a fifth-floor gelateria. “By day three the kids had stopped asking where we were going and just started looking for places to sit.”

The family’s 16-year-old son, Tyler, said he has now seen the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps exclusively over his father’s shoulder, in the background of photos captioned “Look at this paint aisle.”

Witnesses in Florence reported Pellston spending twenty-two minutes comparing two nearly identical garden hose connectors, then asking the shopkeeper, in English, spoken slowly and loudly, whether the Italians “just do it differently on purpose.” The shopkeeper, who has run the store for thirty-one years, reportedly said, “Sì.”

“That’s the kind of exchange you can’t get on a guided tour,” said Pellston.

Experts say the behavior is well documented. “The American father abroad experiences a kind of gravitational pull toward retail environments in which he can identify every object,” said Dr. Lorenzo Vittadini-Marsh, senior fellow in Comparative Fastener Anthropology at the Institute for Transatlantic Wing Nut Studies in Bologna. “Cathedrals are overwhelming. A bin of hex bolts is a language he already speaks.”

Vittadini-Marsh noted that the condition tends to peak around the third store of any trip, when the father begins using phrases such as “now this is craftsmanship” and “they just get it here.”

The trip’s emotional low point, family members said, came in Venice, where Pellston declined a gondola ride but spent ninety minutes in a shop selling rope, which he later called “the most Venetian thing we did.”

“I didn’t buy anything in the museums, but I bought a stud finder in Siena, and I’ll think of Siena every time I find a stud.”

Pellston said the trip changed him, noting that he now plans to “look into” metric.

At press time, the family was reportedly at Fiumicino Airport, where Pellston had left security to ask whether the terminal had a small tools section, and Denise was telling the children that next year they were going to a cabin.