Driving in Italy and France

Posted by Anura Samara, 14 June 2014

We’ve just finished out driving holiday in Italy and France, with a real mix of roads. Let’s start with highways …

The highways in both Italy and France are modern and good ways of getting around. I was impressed by the number of rest areas and services available on both, and with speed limits of 130km/h it’s a quick way of getting from A to B. The downside of all of this is the tolls. When you hire a car, you know the cost of the car and can probably do the mental sums for fuel – but our holiday probably cost us close to EUR100 extra in tolls. It’s not just the tolls but the variety of systems too – at some stops, you just take a ticket which is used at the next toll stop to calculate the amount, other times you pay a flat rate. Sometimes you pay a person, sometimes it’s just a machine. Sometimes the machine will take cash, sometimes it will only accept cards. It really helps to have a ‘co-driver’ with you to juggle tickets, change and cards.

Despite what people had told us driving in the mountains and even around the Cinque Terre was pretty easy. Clearly, the European definition of narrow, winding roads is not like ours in Australia – here, they were mostly wide and well maintained.

The only driving conditions we don’t have in Australia are the narrow streets through old villages. In some cases, even major roads have to work their way through the old buildings, in some cases with barely enough room for two cars to squeeze through (forget about it if a bus or truck is coming the opposite way).

Of course, having a GPS system is an absolutely life (or should I say marriage?) saver. It takes all of the stress out of planning the journey and most of the driving – although you always need to keep your eye on what it’s doing. I like the way that there is a European traffic reporting systems which integrates with the GPS, so that you get a warning of upcoming traffic problems and sometimes even re-routed around them.

And driving on the right? Completely natural now.

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