Italians in Slow Driving Shocker!

The summer of 2013 presented me with the opportunity to tick off one of the items on my Ultimate Bucket List. Unlike a regular Bucket List, which is simply a compilation of things you want to do before you kick the proverbial pail, to qualify for the Ultimate Bucket List must meet a second criterion: an increased risk that the kicking might happen during your attempt rather than before or after it. 

Because I am a bit of a wuss, driving in Italy was risky enough to qualify.

My first experience of stereotypical Italian driving occurred when I was working in Campania during the summer of 2005 and a local guy who was, ironically, a member of the Protezione Civile offered to drive us to a nearby town for a party. After an hour long white-knuckle ride where Mr Civil Protection zigzagged along the motorway at double the speed limit, taking both hands off the wheel every couple of minutes while he called his friend for directions (the friend had no idea either) before overtaking on the hard shoulder and finally parking on the hatched triangle between the main road and the sliproad while he worked out where to go, we emerged pale-faced from the car looking terrified enough to convince someone else to offer to drive us back. This was followed by a year in Milan, where I never sat behind the wheel myself but was a fairly regular passenger and was impressed enough by what I saw to write this post. Which was why doing my fair share of the driving on our journey from the Valle d'Aosta to the Ligurian coast via Milan grew in my head to be something of an adventure, and worthy of the U.B.L.

When we popped out of the Mont Blanc tunnel and on to the autostrada, I realised that I wasn't very sure what the speed limit was. Italian roads, like French ones, often don't have times to tell you the actual number of kilometres per hour if it conforms to the national speed limit for that kind of road. In France, as long as there are other cars on the road, this isn't a problem, as the vast majority of people will be driving at precisely the limit plus 2 or 3 km/h . If you let your speed drop to even just 2 km/h below the limit, the person behind you will probably very kindly remind you to speed up by tailgating you and flashing their lights. 

In Italy, we had no idea.

Unsurprisingly, people seemed to be doing more or less whatever speed they wanted. 

Surprisingly, that speed, more often than not, seemed to be well under the limit, often by up to 20 or 30 km/h.

(In fact, the limits are exactly the same as in France: 130/110/90/70/50 depending on the type of road. The main difference is that the Italians seem to enjoy using a wider range of numbers for more dangerous sections of roads, such as 100 and 80 as well as 90 and 70.)

Our second surprise was that we never heard anybody honking their horn in the whole time we were there. Not when people parked in the middle of the narrow Ligurian high streets and nobody could get past. Not when we had to queue for twenty minutes to pay the tolls on the Turin bypass. Not even when we had to a poor old man hadn't understood how to pay for his ticket to get out of a car park and kept everyone waiting behind him, meaning that the time limit on everybody else's tickets ran out and we all got stuck inside.

All in all, driving in Italy was a relatively stress-free experience, apart from when we got stuck behind someone driving slowly on the motorway or couldn't honk the horn when we were desperate to get out of the car park. 

Just in case anyone is disappointed, as I was, a little, that driving in Italy isn't guaranteed to provide the adrenaline buzz I expected, I can confirm that people rarely use their indicators and you can still experience that sense of tension as the car in the lane in front of you repeatedly veers to the left as if it is going to pull out in front of you. I guess most drivers are still too busy gesticulating and using their mobile phones to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

At the Garage

After our encounter with the friendly mechanic at the Fiat garage in Via Corsico, Mr A. and I went back on Monday morning to drop "La Punto" off. (Because the word for car in Italian (macchina) is feminine, you use la even when the name of the car is masculine.) We met another mechanic, who was the one who actually ended up servicing the car and sat down to discuss prices with us. I had brushed up on some vocabulary this time and the guy was both very friendly and very professional. He gave us quotes for prices and an estimated time to do the work, remembering that it might take longer to order the parts for a British car, and when he heard that Mr A. was taking the car back to England for her MOT, we had a chat about the differences between the UK and Italian versions of the test. (In Italy, they only check the basics (brakes, lights, tyres etc) whereas in Britain, everything that worked in the car when it was new now has to be in working order to pass the test.) We arranged for the work to be done and when we went back on Tuesday to collect the car we found that he had also very kindly checked the oil and put air in the tyres to prepare the car for her long journey home.

On the way back into Milan we stopped off at a tyre place to get a quote for replacing the two front tyres and had a very different experience. The mechanic who greeted us had a big smile and a loud chuckle and looked unnervingly like a clown in his red overalls. There were no other cars in the garage, only about three other mechanics with nothing to do. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How much will it cost to change the tyres on the car?
Clown: Hmm, let me have a look and see how many need changed. (Something in Italian that I didn't understand.)
Me: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Clown makes a gesture that clearly means, "turn the steering wheel so that I can see the tyres." Mr A. opens the driver's door and turns the wheel. Clown stops peering in the passenger side of the windscreen and starts to laugh.
Clown: Ahahahahahaha! It's an English car! The steering wheel is on the other side! Hahaha!
Clown finally manages to stop laughing. Mr A is beginning to look worried.
Me: So how much will it cost for the tyres?
Clown looks up price list behind the counter.
Clown: Well, you've got Michelin tyres but we're out of these. I could do another make for 220 euros.
Me: Mr A., he says 220 euros.
Mr A. starts to get back into the car.
Mr A.: The guy at the Fiat garage was only 200 euros. Let's go.
Me (to clown) : Thanks, but another garage gave me a better quote. Goodbye.
Clown: Ah, just hold on a minute. I can give you a cheaper offer with another make of tyres. How much did the other garage say?
Me: 150, including labour. (Afterwards, I decided I should have said 100).
Clown: OK. I can do it for 140 euros.
Me: He says 140.
Mr A. (still looking worried): OK, let's go for it.
Clown 1 calls Clown 2 over to get started on the work. Clown 2 gets in the passenger side of the car. He passes me my handbag, which is on the floor, then realises something is wrong and starts to laugh hysterically.
Clown 2: It's an English car! I was wondering where the steering wheel was! Ahahahahah!
Clown 2 eventually stops laughing, gets in the driver's side of the car and starts the engine.
Clown 2: This feels really strange. I don't know if I can drive this thing. Puts his foot on the accelerator. Get out of the way guys, I'M COMING!!!!


3 days later... The car has arrived in England. The tyres are still OK. The new brake pads that they ripped us off by telling us they were selling us 4 instead of 2 seem to still be attached to the car. Mr A's hair is not yet grey. And once again, I got a lot of education and an amusing story out of the experience.

How to Drive Like an Italian

The Italians are such notoriously bad drivers that it seems almost unsporting to write a post criticising their motoring habits. The death rate from road accidents in Italy was 11.7 per 100 000 of the population, compared to 5.81 in the UK, 9.49 in France and 8.03 in Germany. Nevertheless, Italians appear to enjoy driving, and one of the things which I do like about their attitude is the fact that, although they will honk their horns incessantly if they have to wait too long at traffic lights, they will often sit patiently as another driver attempts an obviously crazy manoeuvre on a narrow country road. And crazy driving is not the preserve of a small minority. It is ingrained in the national mentality and supported by everything from the police to the road markings. Rather than criticising, therefore, I have instead compiled a list of advice for those who would like to drive like the locals and enjoy a quintessentially Italian experience:

Don't expect lane markings to be present, especially on big roundabouts and motorways. You can change lanes by cutting someone up any time you want, so why would you need them?

Don't ever stop at a zebra crossing, unless it's because you intend to park on it.

Do use the hard shoulder on the motorway to get past traffic jams. There is no reason why the people at the front of the queue shouldn't let you in ahead of them when you get to the front.

Do not be surprised if the sliproad joins the motorway in the fast lane. This is entirely sensible – why would anyone want live life anywhere other than in the fast lane?

Don't use your indicators. The flashing may distract others from the glint of your bling-bling designer sunglasses, which you must wear at all times when driving. (This rule applies especially when changing lanes on the motorway at 130 km/h.)

Do double park your car. Or, for the ultimate experience, park on the pavement where someone can block you in and enjoy reversing 100 metres down the block to get out, forcing pedestrians to flatten themselves against walls as you do so.

Do honk your horn repeatedly when the queue at the motorway toll booths doesn't move fast enough. If Italians didn't enjoy waiting impatiently for other people to pay, they would all have bought Telepasses by now.

You will sometimes have the opportunity to turn right at a junction when the pedestrian crossing on your exit street is green. In theory, you should give way to any pedestrians on the crossing, but in practice this only applies if the person crossing is a nun.

Disclaimer: I have never actually driven a car in Italy. Take this advice at your peril!

An Adventure

It snowed last Friday in Milan. Big flakes were falling all day and the city looked very pretty. By Saturday, however, it was just pouring with rain and by Sunday it seemed to have mostly dried up, so a friend and I set off in his car for a walk by one of the lakes, hoping to see the snow still lying on the mountains. We didn't have a map, so we decided to rely on my friend's trusty TomTom.

The TomTom got us most of the way there, but as we left the main road and wended our way through small towns with narrow streets and one-way systems, she decided to abandon us. Eventually, we found the right road, a twisting, single-track road up a very steep hill. To make the experience a little bit hairier, there were racing cars coming down in the opposite direction. They weren't actually racing, as far as we could tell, but they were certainly driving more fearlessly even than the average Italian.

As we got further up, heavy rain began to fall. Then the rain turned to snow. The cars were still coming, the bends were getting tighter and the tyres were losing their grip. On the biggest bends there were groups of locals cheering on the racing cars, or any other driver stupid enough to go past. With nowhere to turn round, we had no choice but to go on, hoping that there would be a better road down the other side of the mountain. At one point, with the car stopped and hugging the cliff above us, we saw one of the racing cars skid and do a 90 degree turn so that its length spanned the whole width of the road. With the help of three people, the driver was just able to turn it round and carry on.

Eventually we arrived at the top of the hill, where there was a car park and a few people standing around. I got out of the car, hoping that they could tell us a better way down but they said the road ahead was closed. The only way down was the way we had come up, so off we went.

After our own little skid on the way down, I admitted to my friend that I was scared. Really scared.

“We'll be fine,” he said. “The car's built for it.”

We continued on our perilous way, with my friend inching the car around the hairpin bends and me muttering prayers of thanks every time we made it in one piece. Finally, we got to the bottom.

We stopped the car and checked the tyres, then drove on. It was only once we hit the motor way that my friend finally breathed a deep breath and said, “That was really, really scary.”
Never had the Italian Autostrada seemed such a safe and comforting place to be.