[Itinerary Page]The daily diary of a wandering restaurateur
May 30 - Lake Como
The trip from Santa Margherita to Milan took about three hours, most of it on the autostrada. We are in wind-down mode and the photos tell most of the story for today anyway. Since we have spent a lot of time in the car on this trip, perhaps I should give a short dissertation on my experiences of driving in Italy.
Italy has a good autostrada system -- 4-6 lane roads that let you go quickly between major points in the country. The nominal speed limits are 90-130 kph (60-85 mph) but the general plan is to drive as fast as you want to. We have never seen any law enforcement presence on the autostrada.
It is an interesting paradox to me that while Italians generally live a very relaxed lifestyle, that all changes when they get behind the wheel of a car (or on a motorcycle or scooter.) Give them an engine and they feel the need for speed! On the autostrade, this means that the left lane is truly for passing only. If you attempt to travel in the left lane, you will quickly have a Mercedes, Audi or BMW inches from your back bumper, flashing their lights ... at 110 miles an hour! 80% of the cars that blow by at warp speed will be one of those three makes.
The Italians have also discovered tolls, and most of the autostrada carry a fee. They have a telepass system so that locals can zip through the toll booths without stopping (although they do have to slow down a bit!) The rest of us either ante up with a toll collector or slide the ticket and a credit card into a machine that will do it all automatically -- at least most of the time. Every now and then the machine can't read the information on the magnetic strip of the credit card and it gets real interesting. On a couple of occasions we have been frantically shoving one card after another into the machine trying to get one to work while a computerized voice gives us unintelligible reprimands in Italians and traffic piles up behind us! It would make quite a movie scene.
During one of these feeding frenzies, the machine spit one of my cards out so violently that it fell on the ground under the car. There was no way to open the door to get it, so we had to drive through, park, walk back and try to jump in between the other vehicles to retrieve it! Talk about feeling like an idiot ... At least the machines are more polite than the toll-takers. When the transaction is successfully completed, the nice computerized voice wishes you "Arriverderci" as you drive away. That is more than we have heard from the humans.
Driving on the secondary roads is the same dance, just at a slightly slower pace. People are still in a big rush, will still ride your tail and will pass you anytime they can see more than 30 meters down the road. Hills and curves are not considered impediments to passing and scooters/motorcyles will pass anytime they want to, regardless of what is happening in the other lane!
In my estimation, the only way to drive safely in Italy is just to drive like an Italian (which Margene maintains that I do anyway!) As long as everyone is doing the same craziness, the whole system works. We have seen only one or two traffic accidents in our three weeks ... and we have not been one of them!
© 2003 Restaurant Doctor