driving in rome

oh no! - not more problems !?

child safety on italian roads

Baby/child safety-seats in cars are a rare sight. Babies are instead bounced on mummy’s knee in the front seat while daddy weaves in and out down the ring-road at eighty miles an hour. The other day I saw a man riding a scooter along a fast main road with a small child sitting behind him, and an even smaller tot (perhaps a two-year-old) standing on the 'floor' of the scooter in front of him, holding the handlebars. None were wearing crash-helmets! Here's a picture we snapped on Via Quattro Fontane of another happy family group also employing this practice:

junctions and merge-ramps

The Great British T-Junction as we know it is almost non-existent here - all the junctions are ‘merges’, (ramps) but the length of the run-in is never enough. Sometimes it’s a sort of three-way merge. I am afraid to go out on the dual carriageway or the GRA (Rome's M25 or beltway), as I cannot see how to avoid colliding with someone at the merges can be achieved by any other way than pure luck. I’ve thought and thought how it can be done safely, but cannot find an answer. At least once a week I see the aftermath of a shunt on one of these merges, and the faster roads out of town are dotted with bunches of flowers every couple of miles as tributes marking where people have died. It’s weird. They remove their brains and get into their cars.
There are numerous local B-road junctions where not a single white line is painted on the road, or Give Way (Yield) sign erected, so people just whizz into it and hope for the best. They never give way.
And nobody signals. And nobody ever thanks you for moving over and waiting for them if the road is narrow.
If you assume the correct road-positioning at a junction and are waiting patiently for a gap in the on-coming traffic, people just whizz past you on the inside because they think you’ve broken down or something - Thus, even when doing the right thing, you are in some danger.
When turning right (left in America) into a side-road, and waiting to give way to traffic coming towards you before you can make the turn, a stream of five or six cars may come whistling past your right-ear, driving up the kerb to get into the side road ahead of you.

car parking in rome

There are very few car-parks, (as we would understand that term) in Rome. The only proper one I know of in central Rome is a very large underground multi level one beneath the Villa Borghese park. As a matter of fact, it's so enormous and badly designed and signposted that returning from an afternoon at the nearby zoo, for the first time in my life I couldn't find where I'd parked my car in it. Not because I couldn't remember the approximate positioning of my car, but rather, because I wasn't aware at first that there was actually more than one level to it.
Actually this car-park is quite a long way from anywhere useful, except for the Zoo, the Gallery of Modern Art, and, on the Via Veneto, Harry's Bar.

There is only a pathetically small open car park in front of Termini Station (where, on top of the mandatory municipal parking fee, you will also be pressurised by obnoxious gypsy women into paying protection money for your car), and another near the Via Veneto, so you may as well learn how to park on the street in Rome -
But be careful where you park - In Rome the roadsides are not painted to indicate no-parking zones (ie, double yellow lines as in England). Instead they merely use signs on poles at sporadic intervals and it's up to you to figure out where the no-parking zone begins and ends. If you infringe, you'll get a ticket and maybe even towed. From year 2000, Rome has doubled it's 'vigile' (parking wardens) force in a drive against illegal parking in the city, so watch out, even in the suburbs.

There are no parking meters in Rome, but sometimes there's a 'pay-and-display' permit machine you have to use, and you can also buy parking permit scratch-cards at Tabacchiere. These tickets, either from the machine or the Tabacchiere, allow you to park in any spaces indicated by grids of blue lines painted on the roads.

Parking prices range between 80c and €1.50 per hour for any of the above parking methods, (ie in a car park or on the street).

You can also 'park and ride' (as we say in England) or 'parcheggi di scambio' (as they say in Italy), in open carparks near some major subway stations in the suburbs. This is much cheaper, at about €1.60 per day, but of course, you're nowheer near the centre of town, and you still ned to take a subway ride.
If you do get a parking fine and you don't believe it was fair, pay it, but also write a stiff but polite letter of complaint to the city police department (the address is on the ticket), explaining fully why you think the fine was unwarranted. You may or may not suceed in getting a refund or apology, but the important thing is to make the complaint, as native Romans themselves rarely complain properly about anything and will take any rubbish that Italian bureaucracy hands out. But if enough people start to complain, perhaps things can be changed.
Don't expect to find your car in the same condition as when you left it. While it was parked, someone will most probably have driven into it, needless to say, without leaving you a note saying sorry or leaving a phone number. There's an age-old myth that says Italians are in love with their cars. This simply isn't true, not in Rome anyway. Every single car exhibits a prang of some description, as collisions great and small are everyday occurrences, taken for granted as just part of Italian life's rich tapestry.
All in all it's an expensive place to drive, the highest cost being human life, lost on a regular basis. Goodness knows how the insurance works. premiums must be prohibitively enormous.

...tell us your driving in italy horror stories!

...more about driving in italy