Driving La Bella Italia

[f.Channell]

You can't back up?

Do they do Kumite's in Italy Van........



Couldn't resist.

F.

[Van Canna]

While performing these dangerous gyrations, it is imperative to blow your horn. The more risky the maneuver, the more imperiously you must hoot, for all Italian drivers accept the axiom that anything you do while blowing your horn is sacred. (Horn blowing, incidentally, except in cases of serious danger, is against the law in every Italian city.)

[Van Canna]

Remember that one-way streets in Italy are not one way. To begin with, a driver who has a block or less to go realizes that, when they put up the signs, they were not thinking of cases like his.

He drives it the wrong way, going full throttle to get it over with quickly and to prove that he really is in a terrible hurry.

More importantly, however, Italian one-way streets always have a Controsenso lane -- that is, a lane for going the wrong way.

It is reserved for taxis and buses and is always full of taxis and buses, producing the two-way one-way street which, in turn, produces law suits, pedestrian fatalities and hysterical foreign drivers.

[Van Canna]

The feature of Italian cities is the piazza -- a wide space entered by as many as eight streets in which a Bernini fountain is hidden by parked cars.

Italian police commissioners have sensibly ordained circular traffic for most of the piazzas. But the traffic circle, with its minuet-like formality of movements is, to an Italian driver, just so much exhilarating open space.

You do not go around a traffic circle. You go across it at high speed, taking the shortest path from your point of entry to your intended exit, while sounding your horn.

[Van Canna]

All Italian city driving requires and soon produces familiarity with the Funnel Effect -- especially in those cities that preserve medieval architecture in the down-town section.


All Italian cities are force-fed with automobiles by an excellent turnpike system. This produces both the Funnel Effect and the Reverse Funnel Effect.


At first glance, it may appear that the Funnel Effect is more dangerous and unnerving than the Reverse Funnel Effect.

This is not correct. True, the unwary motorist entering the Funnel may get trapped against the side and have to stay there until traffic slacks off around one or two o'clock in the morning.

But you can usually abuse your way out of the trap.

[Van Canna]

It is the Reverse Funnel that produces what my insurance company keeps referring to as "death or dismemberment."


It's the effect of bottling a number of prideful and excitable Italian drivers in a narrow street for a half mile or more and then suddenly releasing them.


It's like dumping out a sack of white rats. As each car emerges, it tries at once to pass the car ahead of it and, if possible, two or three more.

This car ahead is passing the car ahead of it and so on. If Italian cars were even roughly of the same power, this would simply produce a wild acceleration, but the cars range from 500 cubic centimeter midgets up to Formula 1 racing cars.

The first hundred yards of the Reverse Funnel, before they shake down, is a maelstrom of screaming engines, spinning tires, screeching springs and blowing horns.

[Van Canna]

The paramount feature of Italian highway driving is il sorpasso.

The word means "to pass with an automobile" and "to surpass or excel."

By the way, it is not where you arrive that counts, but whom you pass on the way.

The procedure is to floor your accelerator and leave it there until you come upon something you can pass.

If il sorpasso is not immediately possible, settle in its wake at a distance of six or eight inches and blow your horn until such time as you can pass.

Passing becomes possible, in the Italian theory, whenever there is not actually a car to your immediate left.

[Van Canna]

When an Italian driver sees the car ahead of him on the highway slow down or stop, he knows there can be but two causes.

The driver ahead has died at the wheel or else he has suddenly and mysteriously become a person of no consequence, which is roughly the same thing and a fate that hangs over every head.


If the driver ahead has, in fact stopped for a yawning chasm, the passer is done for.

But more often, the first driver has merely stopped for a railroad crossing gate. The same thing, naturally, is happening on the other side of the gate. The result is the Crossing Double-Cross or Railroad Impasse.

[Van Canna]

The instant the gates go up, all drivers obey the Law of Occupation of Empty Space and four of the cars meet in the middle of the tracks, followed closely by four-handed Personal Abuse.

The drivers of the left-lane cars usually team up against the drivers of the right-lane cars, but this is by no means a rule.

Sometimes the three in the more expensive cars will team up against the one in the cheapest car. Sometimes all four fall upon the crossing guard.

[Van Canna]

In Italy you will see bigger trucks than you have ever seen in your life -- huge, eight-axle double semis with cabs seating four abreast.

There are no special speed limits for trucks in Italy. As if the very sight of these things were not terrifying enough, the drivers paint mottoes across their cabs, just above the windshield, usually religious.

It is nerve-shattering to meet one of these monsters coming downhill at fifty miles an hour on a narrow mountain road. But panic looms if you see GOD Is Driving written on the cab, while Heart of Jesus, Help Me doesn't bear thinking about.

[Van Canna]

It is gauche [Lacking social polish; tactless.]
to be a pedestrian in Italy. It is in bad taste. A pedestrian is a Person of No Consequence.

The Italian pedestrian does everything he can to avoid acting like a pedestrian.

To cross the street in the crosswalk, for instance, would be to admit he is a pedestrian, so he crosses in the middle of the block, strolling slowly through traffic.

He is trying to make it clear that he is not a pedestrian at all, but a driver who has momentarily alighted from his car.

[Van Canna]

If you treat him like a pedestrian, thus drawing attention to his shame, he will be furious.

Do not look directly at him. Do not drive around him. If he challenges you to drive within four inches of his toes, drive within four inches of his toes, as if he were not there.

Of course, if you drive on his toes, he will become an Injured Party, which in Italy outranks even a Ferrari driver, and he will shout Personal Abuse and call a cop.

[Van Canna]

To get some idea of the Italian Scooter Plague, imagine the chinks between cars to be filled with hurtling motor scooters, each sounding its tiny horn, racing its motor.

Sticklers for naked realism can go on to imagine the chinks between scooters filled with bicycles and small children learning to rollerskate. I used to think that nothing could be worse than the Italian Scooter Plague, but I was wrong.

As young Italians get more money in their pockets, the Scooter Plague gives way to the Motorcycle Menace which is louder, faster, smokier, and altogether more surpassing.

[Van Canna]

The Italian word for an automobile collision is L'Investimento.

When you are involved in a collision (notice I do not say "if," but "when"), you will at first wonder what you should do.

Sit tight until a cop arrives? Call the consulate? Start bribing witnesses? Don't worry. The aftermath of L'Investimento, provided there is no serious injury, is as formal as the figures of a quadrille. Simply follow your partner.

First, all drivers and passengers spring from their cars shouting Personal Abuse. Passersby spring from their cars.

Pedestrians, hopeful of being taken for motorists, act as if they have been principals in the crash.

Stores empty as shoppers join the crowd. Invalids rise from their beds for blocks around to totter to the scene, shouting and gesticulating.

Do not be afraid of this crowd. Even if you are utterly and absolutely in the wrong. Half these people are on your side simply because the other half are against you.

[Van Canna]

If a priest has blamed you, the Communists become your partisans.

If a rich man should point out that you were, after all, dead drunk and driving up the sidewalk with your eyes closed, any man with calluses on his hands will swear he has known you as a teetotaler for many years.

All this blame and praise in unimportant, however. In an Italian collision, blame has nothing to do with the actions of the drivers but is entirely a matter of status and virility.

The driver of the newer, more expensive car is automatically in the right.He is, in fact, an Injured Party.