People often ask me what the big differences are between Canada, where I’m from, and Italy, where I have lived for 4 ½ years with my wife running a small-group tour company.
There are a lot of differences, but one of the big ones is the driving.
In Canada for the most part, people treat the roads as a place to get from A to B in a safe and orderly manner. In Italy, it seems the idea is always to drive as aggressively as possible, taking any and all steps to gain even the slightest advantage over other drivers.
I know this because I’ve done a lot of driving in both countries. As a journalist in Canada, I spent a lot of time on the road, and in Italy, as part of my duties for our company, I’ve made the two hour trip from our place in Torre de’Passeri in the region of Abruzzo to Rome more than 100 times to pick up and drop off guests. I’ve also done more than 150 tour days.
To illustrate, I’m going to break it down to open highway driving, highway driving in heavy traffic, secondary road driving, and city driving.
Open Highway – Get outta my way!
The trip to Rome is mostly on a four-lane divided highway where speed limit is 130 km/h. You’d think that’s plenty fast, and you’d be wrong – 200 km/h or more is normal.
This makes passing slower moving vehicles, like transports going up hills, an adventure.
I’ve looked in my mirrors and saw no car behind in the left lane then pulled out to pass and magically there’s a guy (it’s always a guy) standing on his brakes so he doesn’t slam into the back of me. This is usually followed by a torrent of flashing headlights, blasting horn, and hand gestures suggesting my mother’s virtue is going to be compromised in the very near future.
Usually, I floor it, pass the vehicle, get back in the right lane as fast as possible, and then try to sign language my apologies. It never works. Instead often the other driver inches up beside me and gives me the gesture that suggests I should explore the possibly of having sex with myself a before they take off like a shot into the distance and within seconds disappears from view. It’s not pretty and if I have guests in the vehicle, they invariably ask what all that was about. That’s my cue tell them that this is all very normal.
Side Roads – Get the hell outta my way!
When it comes to secondary roads, you need to understand something about Abruzzo geography. There are almost no flat spaces or straight lines anywhere. We have hills, bigger hills, mountains, and a tiny, kinda flat strip along the winding Adriatic coast.
This makes for narrow, twisting roads, filled with switchbacks, often with steep drops just off the shoulder. Guard rails are spotty to non-existent, wildly uneven pavement is routine, and you share the road with cyclists, transports, cows, sheep and, at night, wild boar big enough to total your car.
For Italians, these conditions present the perfect opportunity to hone their rally car skills as they race each other up and down mountains like they need to get to grandma’s house before the pasta gets cold. They tailgate so closely, you can see the colour of their eyes. They pass on curves and when there’s not enough room, often forcing on-coming cars to swerve right onto the shoulders to avoid head-on collisions. They floor it on the straights and brake hard into the turns, using both sides of the road and drifting like a Formula 1 drivers.
The trick on these roads is to not pay attention. If a car is tailgating you, ignore it. If they are flashing their headlights, ignore them. If they are pulling out to pass on a curve, let them go. If they pull out to pass while a car is coming at you, pull over to the far right of the road so the imminent head-on impact glances off the left side of your car and possibly keeps you and your passengers alive.
Another option is to get in on the fun. If a driver is tailgating you, slow down on the curves. This makes them nuts. Then, just before they pull out to pass on a straightaway, drop a gear and floor it. It’s fun.
Highway traffic jams – Anything goes
My traffic jam experience comes largely from the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s outer ring road. Just over 68 kilometres of four maddening lanes in each direction. On a good day, it’s awful. On a bad day, it’s like a root canal crossed with a colonoscopy.
The problem is there are way, way too many vehicles on the road in Rome due to a series of failed or stupid traffic management, public transportation and city planning projects.
At almost all times of day, 365 days a year, the ring road is plugged up with frustrated commuters, delivery trucks of dubious repair belching dark diesel exhaust, transport trucks grinding gears, and scooters and motorcycles flitting about like moths next to a flame.
The first thing that happens is the right shoulder of the road becomes another lane. Then the shoulder gets jammed too. To get around all this mass of vehicles, motorcycles and scooters start weaving in and out between the cars, using any gap they can fit through. With nothing else to do, the vehicle drivers try to guess which lane is moving faster and start cutting each other off in order to get that all-important car length over their rivals. Horns blast, birds are flipped, Mother Mary is cursed in unimaginable ways.
All this often takes place in excruciatingly hot temperatures under a beating sun. You can smell the rubber, the pavement, the fuel, the frustration. It’s bad.
City Driving – It’s a test of nerves.
Driving in Italian cities is essentially a dare. The narrow streets are not on grids. There are no lanes. You must drive aggressively to get anywhere because, again, there are way too many vehicles. The official rules are arbitrary – two-way streets become one-ways randomly, unmarked lane restrictions are enforced by photo sensors, whole areas are closed to traffic. There are linked roundabouts with no traffic lights and tourists walking around like a bunch of zombies.
Unlike the highways where fast fancy cars rule, downtowns are the domain of the crappy delivery truck, the smashed-up microcar, the pushy city bus, the buzzing scooter, and the wildly impatient taxi. You don’t see many fancy cars downtown because the owners of fancy cars don’t want them to get hit, and in downtowns in Italy, you are going to hit stuff and stuff is going to hit you.
In the roundabouts, you inch forward, daring to hit the cars in front or beside you. The other drivers dare you back until somebody hits somebody or somebody relents. Inch, brake. Inch, brake as tourists pick their way through the vehicles and scooters dart everywhere.
The side streets are only a couple feet wider than a small car, and only inches wider than our nine-passenger tour vans. These streets are packed with tourists and cafes that illegally put tables outside, further encroaching on the roadway. More than once, I’ve clipped these tables and once I ran over a café sandwich board. But the waiters and owners don’t get mad. They know they aren’t supposed to be putting that stuff on the roadway.
Then there are the impossibly tight turns onto idiotically small streets. So many vehicles hit the corners of the buildings, they are chipped away and covered in rainbows of vehicle paint scrapings.
The bumping cars, the scraped vehicles, the inching traffic, the horns, the shouting. There’s nowhere to park. The police yell at you to keep moving. The one-way streets make no sense. There are so many minor fender-benders, people don’t even stop to survey the damage. They don’t get their vehicles repaired either because it’ just going to happen again tomorrow.
It’s chaotic. It’s nerve wracking. Even Romans hate driving in Rome.
All in all, the driving culture in Italy illustrates a paradox about Italians in general. They are mild-mannered, friendly people, but when you put them behind the wheel of a car, even a rusting, 40-year-old piece of junk, they are ridiculously impatient..