driving in rome

some final eccentricities

flashing headlights

When driving in Italy, don't flash your lights to indicate you will give way to other traffic. In Italy this means the opposite to what it does in England.
In England, when we want to give way and wait to let another car go first at junctions and whatever, we flash our headlights at them. Ninety-five percent of the time a flash of the lights in England means - "Go ahead neighbour, it's fine with me - You first please, I'll just wait here a moment until you're done".
In Italy though, flashing headlights means the opposite. It means "Get the heck out of my way, I was here first!"

This is unfortunate because it means in practice that as a driver in Rome you are left with no vocabulary of drive-craft. I've observed many occasions when a small time-consuming traffic jam at a busy road junction in Rome could have been avoided by logical management of the problem by the drivers involved; by a simple combination of adherence to the basic highway-code concerning right of way priorities and the use of flashing headlights to tell each other who can go first. In Italy though, because flashing lights means the opposite, they have no way of communicating "you go first" to another driver, so an impending traffic-jam can only ever be handled confrontationally, and will often result in angry exchanges and even collisions as the drivers have dictated a culture with no sign-vocabulary available to them with which they could have avoided the situation in the first place. In assigning only a meaning of hostility to the flashing of headlamps, they have at a stroke denied themselves a method of communicating submission, apology or well-meaning friendliness to other road users. It does not take too much imagination to realise that this little quirk of Italian driving politics is symptomatic of a trait in the broader makeup of Italian culture. Italians tend to be impatient and adversarial rather than trusting and conciliatory and have little faith in the ability of rules or government to administer justice and civic order - hence their election of a new government, local or national, on average, every ten months, and their refusal to acknowledge the existence or relevance of the highway code or any other laws framed for their own protection.

road markings

You won't find many painted on the roads in Rome. Italy is one of those countries which believes that the wider you paint the white lines at a stop junction, the more serious it is to stop. A thin line is only for wimps to stop at. Hence there are colossal wide stop lines painted on the roads in Rome, though most of them have been rubbed out by high-speed braking skid marks so are largely ignored. As few drivers take any notice of road markings, local councils and highway departments rarely bother to paint any - it's just money down the drain to them. This means that most road junctions are a free-for-all fight, with no-one having the slightest idea who has right of way. But just as a rough guide, we can offer you this titbit of information - deep down in his heart, every Italian believes that he alone has right of way...

italian traffic cops

Okay, now get this - It's 9.15 pm on Saturday November 6th 1999. On the Via Aventino in central Rome I was driving along and suddenly see the aftermath of a motor accident - I draw closer and see that a police car is involved. I get a little closer before I can see the other car the police car collided with. Guess what? It's another police car! Both cars are write-offs, their front ends are crushed in - A head-on collision between two police cars on a busy city street - Getting the idea about Roman drivers now? if that's how the police drive, what can you expect from the civilians?
The police just stand there posing with their leather jackets, guns and sunglasses, pretending that they’re American ‘cops’ and randomly pulling in people for no good reason at all, just to make a show of it.
Whatever may be framed in the written laws of the nation, in practice there seem to be no rules, none that are ever enforced by the police anyway, except when it suits them, such as when some kid on his moped shot out and literally rode underneath a friend of mine's car recently - the traffic warden instantly wrote my friend an on-the-spot fine of fifty quid! Probably because he knew the local lads would have beaten him up if he’d only fined the kid. It’s appalling.

...more about driving in rome