Italians don’t deserve their reputation as terrible drivers

This realisation dawned on me one day in Sicily’s Ragusa. I’d turned into a narrow street that climbed a hill when I saw the one-way sign, and my way was wrong. I put the VW into reverse but now I was blocking a bus. Reversing was tricky. Edge forward, edge back, then do it all over again, but the bus driver wasn’t fazed, nor were the cars backed up behind it, not a toot.

Earlier on that same trip, driving through the hills north of Terni in Umbria, I got stuck behind an ambulance. Although this one had its siren and light on, it was proceeding at a feeble pace that suggested a less than urgent mission and soon a line of vehicles built up behind me.

Despite the double dividing lines on the two-lane road, each car would approach, check for oncoming traffic then overtake me and the ambulance. Why not? It was an intelligent solution, and eventually I did the same.

The mad, bad and dangerous Italian driver has become a trope, fixed in timid minds, especially British, American and Australian minds. My answer – when in Rome, etc. Behind the wheel, Italian drivers are often compassionate. Kindness to cyclists is ground into their DNA. If you’re negotiating a tight spot, they sympathise. Need to merge? Put your blinker on and they’ll oblige.

What they will not tolerate is incompetence, closely followed by timidity. Italian roads breed a special kind of driver and apart from the autostradas and state highways, many of those roads were plumbed through walled hilltop villages with narrow passages built for defence.

Even in a tiny Fiat, most probably manual, negotiating those roads will challenge drivers nurtured on Australia’s boulevards and they commit some cardinal mistakes. And out on the autostradas, linger in the fast lanes at less than 150 km/h and the error of your ways will be revealed when an Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio suddenly appears in the rear vision mirror with lights on full beam.

There is, however, another driver that terrifies even the Italians and that’s the one from Andorra. If you see a licence plate denoting this tiny mountainous principality, steer clear. Mad, bad and dangerous doesn’t even come close.