Driving in Italy: Part I

Driving in Italy

Of course I had heard for decades that Italian drivers were all crazy and thought they were Mario Andretti. So naturally I was intimidated. Just the fact that my Italian language skills in 2007,were either non-existent or, at best, very rudimentary and likely not up to reading road signs which are internationally consistent but not comparable to those in the US, would be enough to cause trepidation.

Our first trip to the country was on a bus tour, and I was in sensory overload and  had very little insight to what was happening on the road beside me, only having a limited view out my window, with lots of internal distraction provided by the passengers, our guide, and the people we were traveling with.

Besides, even in a place with supposedly crazy drivers, who was going to argue with a 45 foot long bus?

My first rental was not, by US standards, a big car. The Alfa Romeo 159 I needed to accommodate us plus some friends who joined us on this trip, seemed to be about the size of our G35 Infiniti. But for ancient European cities this was a big vehicle, adding to my concerns. And this was not exactly assuaged by the challenge of getting out of the Rome airport parking garage.

Six speed diesel elegance
from Wikipedia

 

Best I recall the rental car parking area is on at least the fourth level of the garage. The parking spaces for the cars are, without exaggeration, perhaps a foot wider than the car at best. Getting in without dinging the doors of the cars beside ours was the first challenge. This was followed by a down ramp which was like driving on a spiral staircase...all I could see over the hood was the wall of the ramp...which was yet another exercise in keeping off something that seemed to be about six inches from the side of the Alfa.

With more than a bit of discomfort and sweat we made it out and followed what were fairly clear signs to the connector autostrada to the GRA...the huge freeway which circles metro Rome and connects to the main N-S route to Florence in the North and Naples in the South...the A1.

My first surprise was a reassuring one. There was no craziness on this multi-lane highway, and within a few miles I was almost as relaxed and confident as I would be driving at home...except for trying to decipher the signs and figure out which lane I needed to be in.

Typical Autostrada Direction Sign
What about Roma West?
If the GRA goes to Firenze and Napoli why does the right sign indicate Napoli?
What does the blue "Rieti" indicate?
No clue

I was happy for Sherri's observations and help in looking for anything on these white on green overheads which said “Firenze.” 

Traffic was fairly heavy and speeds were kept to the legal limit which, best I recall, was well below the 130kph on the A1, for which I was grateful. I did not relish the idea of 80+ while adjusting to the driving culture and looking for where I needed to be at the same time. The Italian Auto Club atlas we had was a big help as it had schematics of all the autostrade in the country with mileage markers, exits, and service plazas graphically represented so we could tell where we were, where the next exit was, and where we needed to be.

Section of A1 Autostrada Schematic
Atlante (Atlas) Stradale d'Italia (Centro)
Touring Club Italiano

We easily made the merge into the A1 itself, annoyed only by an overly aggressive move by an Audi...something I gradually learned to expect as the norm for many people who own them. Though the reason is unknown I began to suspect these folks had some sort of inferiority complex and had to “prove” they were as good and as fast as, say, a Mercedes. In the words from a recent movie: “Four zeros in the grill and another behind the wheel.” Nasty but, at least in this case, true.

Driving on the A1 was even more pleasant. Once out of metro Rome the road had only two lanes in each direction, but virtually no one clogged up the left lane. It was easy to observe that protocol and courtesy demanded driving in the right lane until you came up to pass a slower moving vehicle. At which point you signal, move over the left, accelerate til well past, and then move back to the right. There were exceptions...usually a car moving much faster than the legal 130 (a bit over 80MPH) and flashing its lights as it roared past at well over this pace...not surprisingly, more often than not...an Audi.

Our late arrival in Rome made it unwise to go straight to Montepulciano but instead we stayed at some halfway point overnight... Spoleto. Everything on the A1 went fine, even stopping for a meal at one of the best “fast food” places on any limited access road I have driven...Autogrill, where “fast food” could and did mean fresh pasta cooked on the spot, along with very tasty side dishes and salads, and clean rest rooms.

Then things got a bit more tense, as we departed the autostrada for a provincial or regional two lane. Again, I have to say, nothing “crazy” happened, but I was concerned that might be because we were trapped behind some slow moving commercial trucks, as was everyone else, so perhaps this was keeping the anticipated lunacy down?

I stopped on the outskirts of Spoleto to see if I could get directions to our hotel. But I was too shy to try Italian and the folks in the station spoke no English so...on into town I trundled. And here things got much more “dry mouth dicey”.

Spoleto
From bedandbreakfast.it

The hotel was in the center of the city...in every Italian town I know of the direction signs for this area show a sort of bullseye symbol and either “Centro” or “Centro Storico” (historic center). You can see this in the earlier picture on the righthand sign on the Autostrada. Many towns also have some manner of ring road which allows you to skirt the town without actually driving into it...for good reason. Most are hundreds if not thousands of years old, and the streets in the central area were designed for a horse or small buggy, not modern autos. They are always narrow...never more than the width of perhaps a single freeway lane in the US, often steep, and always with no sidewalks and buildings which come right to the edge of them, often blocking view for more than a couple of dozen feet. 

So naturally I wound up on a One Way “Mirror Scraper” which was perhaps two feet wider than the car at best...facing what I could clearly see looked like a building at the end of the street.Things were so closed in that a way out was not obvious. There was no place to pull off the street until we came to a tiny gravel parking lot, perhaps big enough for three cars but occupied by four or more, attached to what looked like a small hotel. Since there was no room to park without blocking the other cars all I could do was send Sherri in to ask for directions. She came back out, said no one inside spoke English but with hand signs made it clear we could only continue in the direction we were headed.

My photo of a "Mirror Scraping" Street in Spoleto
Ending at a "T" with similar buildings on the cross street
After dark no less

When we got to the T at the end there was indeed a cross street, but it was clear to me that I could not turn into it in a single move, nor could I see around the buildings to determine if anyone was driving down it. I have learned since to be confident that anyone coming down a street in that kind of situation is savvy enough to be doing only about 10MPH and will also be alert and aware enough to be on the lookout for cars hidden by buildings at the crossings. But without that later learning, all I could do was make Sherri get out and stand in the cross street to (hopefully) halt oncoming cars while I executed a three point left...the only possible way the Alfa could make the turn.

Needless to say, once I found our hotel and its pocket sized garage we left the car there and walked everywhere until ready to leave town...after I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and stopped shaking, that is.

It was a relief to get back on even a country two lane compared to the “alley no lanes” in the center of one of these old towns. That feeling persisted until entry into Montepulciano, when the “Dry Mouth Blues” set in again, partly augmented by the fact that our landlord's instructions were not updated to note that the gas station he told us to turn at had gone defunct and was now nothing more than a commercial storage building with no sign of its previous life.

I quickly observed that there were indeed driving patterns which were characteristic of Italy, and by watching carefully I found they were anything but crazy and, in fact, constituted the most rational and competent I have experienced other than on a race track. But I think it is their very rapid decisiveness which unnerves Americans. I quickly learned that Italians will “telegraph” quite clearly what their intentions are, and then act on those intentions just as quickly. If their eyes indicate they are going to turn, a fraction of a second later they indeed will, and they expect you to react and let them. You never have to wonder what exactly they are thinking or are gong to do.

This is especially noticeable at the numerous roundabouts that I find so much more efficient than traffic signals and stop signs, and which most Americans find so terrifying. You simply watch the driver's eyes and you will know what they intend. They are not crazy or stupid and they assume neither are you. Dangerous in the US but it works all over Italy, including the chaos of Naples.

Italians will sometimes literally “step over the lines,” though. It is not totally uncommon for someone coming towards you on a two lane country road to, in violation of the rule, cut out to pass a slower vehicle over a solid white line, with too little space and time to make the pass safely without cooperation from both the vehicle being passed and you. The only safe solution does not include cursing or screaming, which simply wastes time. You ease as far towards the shoulder as possible, the passed vehicle does the same, and the passer simply straddles the white line and goes between the two of you. While a bit shocking the first couple of times it does show a trust in people we are not used to here...it also helps that Italians, unlike Americans, know exactly, to the millimeter, how wide their vehicles are and where they end.

I have much more experience now with somewhere around nine months and several thousand miles of driving all over Italy, from Puglia to the Veneto, from the Piemonte to the suburbs of Napoli and the Amalfi Coast. I also have spent much time in major urban cities including Rome, just observing, and have even driven through Florence. In all that time I have only seen evidence of four accidents. Two were minor fender benders at the same blind and acute angled blind intersection in Montepulciano. One was a wrecked big rig in a rest stop along the A1 Autostrada which had not yet been towed away, and the fourth was a downed motorcycle in the Piazza Venezia roundabout, 

Typical chaos in Piazza Venezia
From doovi.com

one of the busiest in Europe. I also recently learned that the fatality rate per 100,000 population in Italy is half that of the US, where I can't go from Jackson to Redwood City, a distance of 135 miles, without seeing at least one crash on our much better roads and freeways.

Speaking of Piazza Venezia, Sherri and I once had to cross it after dark to get to a restaurant which was a long walk further along Corso Vittorio Emanuelle. I took her hand and warned her to not look right or left or to pull back as I made eye contact with drivers about four cars back and stepped into the melee with determination as we waded through buses, trucks, other pedestrians, and motorcycles. As I said, Italians expect and respect firm decisions and clearly telegraphed intentions and we made it through in a total “non event.”

In all that driving in Italy (France too, by the way) I have only had two “close calls” and only one of these was truly unnerving. The more minor was on one trip from the airport to the A1 when a woman in a Fiat Panda failed the “what's around me” test, decided that two cars could occupy the same place at the same time, and tried to move into my lane without looking. That was an easy one as years of racing and motorcycle riding taught me to always be aware of potential threats and escape routes from them. I simply eased over into the next lane, which I had been monitoring all along and knew was clear.

But the second could have ended in real tragedy. We were returning to Montepulciano on the road from Cortona...one of the most beautiful routes I have ever experienced, through rolling hills of plowed fields with great visibility, when an Alfa 147 came hurtling at us around a sweeping bend two feet over the center line, at a speed Michael Schumaker could not have held successfully. 

Yes, this really is a typical road in Tuscany
from sutffandthings.co.uk

The 147 is now, in slightly updated form, called the “Giulietta” as a tribute to an earlier famous Alfa model, but is not imported into the US. It is fairly small, perhaps a bit tinier than the Punto we were probably driving. Still, a head on is about the most dangerous crash imaginable, as the impact speed is the combined speed of each of the vehicles involved. 

Lovely 147 Pinterest Photo

I had about ¼ second to decide whether to throw our car into a broad slide with my door pointed at the Alfa, in the hope that at least Sherri might have a better chance of surviving what I feared would be the inevitable impact. Fortunately the Alfa driver managed to collect it and eased back into his own lane as he flashed past. With all the good things I can say about Italian drivers and driving in that country, it is indeed odd that this, one of the closest calls I have experienced, occurred there.

Italian is a very compact language. While English has well over a million words, Italians make do with only about 150,000, though something like 15 tenses and complex conjugations add considerably to the linguistic “density.” Still, you cannot simply do a word by word translation and come out with anything meaningful. Context and evaluation of the implied rather than the explicit is a must when trying to figure out what is meant in a conversation...or a road sign. And here is the perfect example, my favorite road sign ever, which you will encounter multiple times in any Italian town:

Literally this means “every” (tutti) “the” (le) “direction” (direzione)...which makes absolutely no sense at all. And the arrow adds even more confusion, since you will likely learn the hard way that it does not mean “One Way.” That sign, by the way, is another exercise in not taking it literally, as the wording is “Senso Unico”, where among its multiple meanings “senso” means “direction” and “unico” would mean “single.”

But with “tutti le direzione,” if you only expect cars to be coming from the “tail” of the arrow you might be in for a very unpleasant surprise when you get hit by a car coming the opposite way. This sign has nothing to do with direction limitation. It simply means to can get everywhere in the area, including a way out of town, by following these signs. It means the route will take you “in every direction.”

As will my next post, Part II of Driving in Italy