Driving in Rome

What can I say about driving in Rome that has not been said already?   It's mad, stupid, insane, irrational, unreasonable, nasty, violent and once you get into the right frame of mind - really really great fun!!

I'm not trivialising driving in Rome.  It's a wild experience.   You MUST have a certain neck & nerve to drive there. 

Let's try to break this down, point by point.

  1. There effetively are no Rules of the Road or similar in Rome.  They may exist but nobody pays any attention to them.

  2. The saying of "He who dares, wins" could well apply to driving in Rome.  You must drive aggressively.  If you don't then you will not get anywhere.  Everyone in Rome, from pedestrians, through mopeds (of which there are several million at every junction) through cars, buses, trucks and vans will drive through any space available.  The laws of physics just do not apply to traffic in Rome.   In Rome, traffic can and does get through spaces 20% smaller than the size of the vehicle.

  3. Here in Ireland, as in a lot of countries, if someone flashes their lights at you, it's seen as a courteous gesture, translated loosely as "of course you may come out in front of me".  In Rome it has the opposite meaning.  It loosely translates as "I'm flashing my lights to warn you that I'm coming fast & I have right of way.  Get back you silly moron".  PLEASE.  If you get nothing else from this site, remember that flashing lights warn you to stay back, not to come out.

  4. At night, most garages are completely un-staffed, but have 24 hour service!  This works by 'feeding' 50,000 Lira notes into a machine, which then 'credits' your chosen filler pump with this amount of fuel. (As a VERY rough calculation, 50,000 Lira translates as IR£20 or stg£18 or $28)

  5. Please don't get upset at other motorists driving around you to pass you out at red traffic lights.  I do not exagerate - trust me, it happens all the time!

 

Vehicle Hire in Rome

In this day and age, it's very difficult to go to camp without transport of some sort.  Rome is no exception here.  As with all rentals, shop around.   We spent quite a while getting various quotes from travel agencies, rental companies by phone etc etc etc.  Things can change and regularly do, but we found AVIS on the Internet to be the best value of all.  (About 35% of the Hertz rate for a directly comparable vehicle!!!)

We rented an AVIS group G vehicle which was a 9 seater, air conditioned, Fiat Ducato minibus.  The quality of the minibus was excellent, with air conditioning piped to the back as well as from the dash.  We've no connection with them, but please do check out www.avis.com if you need a quote.   In general they were lovely people to deal with too.

As a tip, we hired our vehicle from downtown Rome (via Sardegna), because it was not available from the airport for our requested booking.  It might be worth considering doing this anyhow as it proved to be cheaper than the airport rates anyhow.

For the benefit of our American site guests, I must point out that this group of vehicle (minibus) seemed to be unavailable at the time of our booking in Automatic transmission.  Being Irish, this wasn't a problem, as nearly all our cars are manual (stick shift) anyhow, but it might be worth keeping in mind.

 

Remember  -  Enjoy your driving.

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