I have traveled all around Europe by car and the autostrada del sole is an unmatched engineering marvel in the old continent.
Italian geography is complex. There's a reason the allied forces took way longer from Naples to Milan than from Normandy to Berlin despite heavily outnumbering the Germans.
I was always super proud of the quality and maintenance of Italian highways. Somewhere around the turn of the century I stopped feeling as proud because maintenance started lacking and other countries that I visited (eastern Europe) has also built some very good roads.
One thing to notice though is that the highways are expensive.
From Rome to Milan in a small car you're paying around 60€s in tolls.
That's not a small price, especially as it is way higher than 15 day passes for all highways in some other central European countries.
Speaking as a Canadian, that's not bad. Our toll bypass for Toronto is about $.50/km, so traveling from one end of the city to the other (~70km) costs about $40-50 depending on the time of day. So it's not great, but it could be a lot worse.
A big part of it is that the 407 is highly privatized and owned by offshore corporations, pension funds, investors, etc.
I didn't fact check the exact numbers but I trust what's there.
But I know for sure there's something oddish with the calculator as I've spent around 80 euros in june between Monteporzio (south of Rome) to the Slovenian border whereas that calculator says I would've spent 51 euros.
Yeah, the Italian highways were a high engineering project. Even the asphalt quality that still used today has the ability to absorb water pretty quickly and don’t leave dangerous patches of water on the road with heavy rains.
The problem is that all the highway projects, despite being government financed, are now mostly in the hand of large private companies and rich families (Benetton) which made the price usage skyrocket. Traveling by car in Italy is now expensive for residents, and the alternative roads are slow and dangerous.
In Switzerland the annual highway subscription is ~€40
> Traveling by car in Italy is now expensive for residents, and the alternative roads are slow and dangerous.
This is quite the generalisation. Slow? Yes for obvious reasons. The speed limit is a lot lower compared to highways. Dangerous? That's silly. Not sure why driving 70kmh on a country road is more dangerous than going 130kmh on a highway.
It all depends where you're going. Some roads are plain bad, others are excellent.
If you hit the edge of the highway at 130kmh you'll likely bounce back onto incoming traffic that's also going 130kmh.
Highways are less dangerous in general simply because of the way you drive on them because there are no crossroads or roundabouts or stop lights and the traffic is a lot more predictable.
Motorways have safety barriers between opposing traffic. They're quite good at stopping cars. Trucks, not so much unless they're concrete, or newer steel barriers of higher class.
Yes but motorways are always multilane so there is traffic going in the same direction. And if I'm hitting a barrier at 130km with 3 other lanes of cars going at 130kmh in the same direction chances are someone's going to hit me.
But that's not the important factor. On the motorway you just turn on cruise control, set it to 120/130kmh, and the car essentially drives itself. There are no crossings, curves are gentle, and everyone is driving more or less at the same speed.
On the roads you do have to watch out for a lot of things, there might be traffic lights, roundabouts, zebra crossings, the speed limit constantly changes from when you cross a town or crossroads, slow vehicles like tractors or even cyclists... So you have to pay constant attention for longer, it is tiring and a tired driver means the chances for an accident are higher.
> So you have to pay constant attention for longer, it is tiring and a tired driver means the chances for an accident are higher.
Don't disagree with that but do disagree with your line of reasoning. Driving the same speed, for hours, on cruise, makes zoning out way more easy. And at 130kmh+ things happen way faster and so you have to be extra engaged to void potentially deadly crashes.
As I said in another comment, they're less dangerous because of the way the traffic works but if you look at the numbers, the fatalities to crashes ratio isn't all that different between highways and country roads.
Volume is obviously different, but there's also fewer people driving on highways than regular roads.
Still, I'd not say that driving on highways is safe while driving on country roads is dangerous. They're both dangerous, just for different reasons.
Highways are now public infrastructure again after buying them back from benetton. 8 billions euro. they got them for free. we just gifted 8 billion to one of the richest families. wow.
they have always been "public infrastructure", private entities have been delegated to "run" it (concessione), so nobody got it for free. The Benetton family had a (very lucrative) contracts to run many highways: yes, many contracts are now back to the public sector
Of course this includes all public roads, not just motorways, but the point stands: the motorways are not privatized and funded by tolls, the tolls just help a bit. And of course it gets tourists to pay too.
To be fair, Italy is about 7 times the size of Switzerland. Italy has the Alps too, although that doesn't explain the ridiculous prices of using the motorway in the Po valley... the only place that I know of which is more expensive is Portugal, which doesn't even have that many motorways, but for the average salary driving there is a luxury.
Yes. And Holding Reti Autostradali S.p.A. owns the 88% of that SPA.
And CDP S.p.A[0] owns 51% of that Holding.
And the Ministry of Economy and Finance owns 83% of the CDP.
So it's just a convoluted way to say that the state owns the majority of it.
You probably also pay that much for gas. It's about 650 km: 5 liters per 100 km at 120 km/h (a little less than the speed limit), it's a little more than 30 liters, which is about 60 Euro. If you travel alone train is probably cheaper and faster. If you travel with friends, car is cheaper but slower.
That "car is slower than train" really only works when everybody happens to live near train station A and when the group of friends plans to take its vacation near train station B.
By plane it can be even worse : time to go to the airport + buffer of one or two hours to not miss the plane + landing and waiting for luggage and then time to go from the airport to your destination.
For our usual vacation, car takes 8 hours (950 kilometers) while plane takes 6h30... Still a win but then you're left with no car or having to rent a car: renting the car is another 30 minutes. So 7 hours vs 8 hours and you re stuck with a car inevitably (for me) shittier than yours.
Train isn't even close to competing time wise in our case. But I have fond memories back when, as a kid, we d put the car on the train and then take the same train.
I have nothing against rail and it s great it s developing in the EU. But on many cases it's simply not a time saver compared to car.
During my time in Italy I've found that the answer to this question is actually quite complex.
Options available are:
-Train
-Car on the highway
-Car through back roads, as in Italy there's always such a route going parallel to the highway - sometimes it's even an old highway that was since demoted.
For destinations within a 150km circle around Bologna a one person ticket, fuel and highway toll costs are roughly the same - ~€10 at maximum. In terms of time train takes approximately 20min less, but you have to get to/from the train station. On the other end, the back roads take an additional hour or so.
Overall the cost table per number of people is like this:
No. of people | 1 | 2 | 3 |
70min Train | 10 | 20 | 30 |
90min Car highway | 20 | 20 | 20 |
150min Car back roads| 10 | 10 | 10 |
There's also Frecciarossa, which takes 60m or even less, but costs €30, so it's left out of the table.
I've actually picked every option from the table at least once because there are additional considerations beyond that few EUR difference, like being able to head back after 10pm, when you'd be hard-pressed to find a train connection or expensive parking like in Venice.
As a Ligurian, it was not so exceptional, surely, back then and still today passing though so many mountains and valleys keeping the road as straight and leveled as possible was remarkable in engineering terms BUT they have created a monster because back then it was a new road, so normal traffic goes through other roads, and start to took the new shiny fast one once done. Unfortunately NO ONE have planned how to re-create it because back than the idea was that the concrete it's like a natural rock, nearly eternal, so there was no plan on how to rebuild any bridge or tube when it will be needed. Meanwhile old roads essentially a re-paved ancient Roman Via Aurelia, was not much developed, still traversing ANY single Ligurian dwelling, so it's definitively unable to sustain today traffic even for short segment to re-made a single bridge or tube at a time.
Here and there some new segments are built and once done traffic got diverted on the new segment, but the overall aging infrastructure is in a terrible shape and while some new segments advance there is still no complete plan because in many segments there is simply no solution so far to build something new due to excess buildings around, not adapt orography and so on.
That's not an isolated case, essentially all other the world all infra are made without any idea about what to do after their expectable service life BUT the Italian issue is also due to the fast construction: if you build something SLOWLY some parts of a big infra will need to be rebuild at a certain point in future, while the others are still operational, so you can upgrade them at an equally slow speed. If you develop all at once as quick as possible well, it will reach the end of life all at once as well. So an original remarkable effort demand another one, than another one more etc and no one can foresee the economical, political, condition when the infra end of life will be reached.
In general MOST post-WWI infra and buildings are now at end of life, all together, since they was built quickly all together and as any quick thing was badly built, with mass speculation, no intention to even trying imaging the future and so on.
We now know in many fields that creating megaprojects might be exiting but way to often the outcome is TERRIBLE, so it's better build much little things instead of few big. A lesson learnt by many, but still to be learned by many others.
The Sun Motorway between Bologna and Florence is double, as the article says: there is the original road (now called "panoramica") and the new super-direct ("direttissima", also called Variante di Valico).
The old road is still interesting to see, even though it's in worse conditions and it takes a longer time to cross. Give it a try on your next Italian road trip!
One thing to note is that the panoramica usually has very little traffic and zero trucks, so while it might take a bit more time it's usually a less stressful experience.
Never knew it was a thing until a couple of summers ago our train from Florence to Como was delayed by like 3 hours, so we canceled the tickets, rented a nice little black Fiat 500 and drove. I was enjoying the sights all the way through as is tradition in Italy (and the old continent in general), but if I recall correctly there was a point on the road where we could choose to take the "Panoramica" route and wow, did it pay off. I will forever treasure that little unplanned experience.
The Panoramica is the original route, the one in the article and in some of the pictures. There is new more direct one now, with more tunnels and less bridges. It's faster but of course it's less scenic.
On a tangential note, Italian food on the Italian highways at the “Autogrill” chain (gas stations and food joints along the route) is better than 90% of “Italian” restaurants in the USA.
No, it's not about criticising, but turning every post into a discussion about the US. There's a lot of Americans in this place, and they don't know much about the rest of the world, so they filter everything through their experience.
"La culture, c'est comme la confiture. Moins on on a, plus on l'étale" — Knowledge is like jam, the least you have, the more you spread it.
{Latin Americans, Europeans, Africans, etc...} don't know much about the rest of the world, either. But it seems that only people from the United States are criticized on this website for not knowing a whole lot about how things go in different continents.
The cliché at hand is more about the quality of Italian food in Italy than about any cuisine in the USA. Food-wise, the US is actually doing pretty well among Western countries. I'm not going to name the countries at the bottom of the list to be respectful, but they mostly don't dispute it.
If you want, coin the name. The fact is that the probability of any topic being mentioned in a discussion approaches one as the length of the discussion approaches infinity. It should have been called Godwin's Tautology. :)
Weirdly I found that most of the restaurants I ate at in Italy were level with or worse than the Italian restaurants in Melbourne, Australia. I think part of it was just that it's hard to find the good ones vs the average/bad ones in Italy while Italian restaurants in Australia tend to all be targeting higher end food.
The Autogrill ones were not terrible but not particularly good. Mostly just stale sandwiches with good quality ingredients.
Spent a couple weeks in Italy last month. Autogrills are ok, but there are actually some quite good restaurants in and outside tourist areas.
We found an amazing Masseria in the Gargano that was great. Outside Venice there was a beer/pizza pub that was exceptional as well. Random is often better than relying on tourist guides.
That said, yelp and google are often unreliable for restaurants. I found the app TheFork was quite useful.
Speaking of Venice, one amazing restaurant we found by chance was Trattoria Alla Madonna. I have a feeling there's a bit of a Curb Your Enthusiasm-type setup there where if you speak any Italian and try to pass as even slightly more local than the average tourist, you get seated at a "locals only" part of the restaurant. I have nothing to base that on other than the fact that the waiter-cum-host sized us up a few times before deciding where to sit us, and when he did, the table next to us was a family of locals that has been eating there after Sunday mass every week for the last few decades. I remember the young gentleman on that table kept asking them to remake the homemade mayo because it wasn't quite right. On the third try, he approved it, and then the waiter confessed the chef also agreed that only that iteration was "just right". Equal parts weird and hilarious.
The food was absolutely amazing and it felt great to be away from the tourists for a bit.
If you are skilled with Google Maps you can find lots and lots of good restaurants in Italy.
Yelp in Italy doesn't really exist, no one in Italy uses that. TheFork is okay for the deals that they have, like coupon etc. but to be fair I would not recommend that for tourists since you'll be missing out lots of nice restaurants since on TheFork there are just a few of them.
Yes, TheFork is limited. We usually go with local recommendations. We also tend to return to the same places so know what we prefer / are looking for.
Places we've eaten at in Puglia (from Tricase to Lecce to Vieste) are a mix of local recommendations, places we've researched, or random luck. A place we stayed outside Treviso/near Venice, the little hotel recommended this pizza place where entering there must have been a hen party or some such (many women poured into slip dresses of a wide age range) and we were skeptical. Turned out to be really quite good - different types of crust, local and other draft beers, etc.
I check the Google reviews, try and screen out any Americans - so fussy and no idea, normally - then just stop by, look and see what the vibe is like. 95% of the time this works perfectly for us and we eat well. I also make a point of asking locals in shops and galleries that we like what places they'd recommend.
I do agree on the big city thing though. I can get Italian food in London that’s as good as or better than most of what we had. But that’s a complement to cities like London and Melbourne rather than a sledge on Italy. We had a series of “good” meals, then a couple of “greats” across Bologna and Tuscany. Absolutely could not complain - apart from the place in Bologna that charged us €10 for pasta e burro for our toddler; screw them.
Italy has become a den of tourist traps. I ate terribly there despite my Italian is still good enough that the locals thought I was a native Roman (I lived there as a teen)
in the year Italy started that "exceptional" project many students in the South had still basic schools in almost open air: that "highway" was the result of a big lobby work by FIAT that wanted all Italians to have a car (their, FIAT, car), and it was something not really needed: oh, yes, it was a bit like the new deal in the US: big infrastructure to have jobs, in a typical Italian contest, a big favour to the Agnelli's family (owner of FIAT and rich industries before, during, and after the war).
Fiat also lobby to remove public buses (filobus, tramway, electrical.. already in place in those years) from main cities: this, of course, to push for cars: not in Torino, their headquarter, but in many many big cities.
To me that motorway is pretty much a sad opera, as sad as all investments made in Dodecanese when Italy took it (for free, without a single serious gunshot) from the Ottomans: there, too, some avveniristic operas.... sea planes bases, big restoration (the walls of Rodos... with a pretty 'exotic' taste, which I like a lot even if is considered a clear example on how not to restore antic city walls :), and of course planty of roads (pretty well done, sure) to serve well in case of military purpose: this in the '20ies when, once again, schools where even more misarable then the 50ies.
Ah, back in the days we were still building public infrastructure. Nowadays everything’s ruined and Mafia is eating up a lot of public spending. Just check the crazy idea of the Messina strait bridge… billions that will be eaten by the clans, instead of maintaining and improving what we already have.
I wish I had the same experience. All my memories of the Italian highways are from being stuck for hours on the Salerno-Reggio on what at the time looked like thousands kms of unpaved and closed roads.
I've been driving from Rome to Calabria for several years now and I think the Salerno-Reggio Calabria has vastly improved while still being without tolls.
I would just say that it's missing some gas station and services but the road is good.
For those interested in the relationship between humans, their supporting infrastructure (not just highways, but also the cities and everything around those), and nature specifically from a perspective of the Autostrada del Mediterraneo: I can suggest this book: www.store.rubbettinoeditore.it/catalogo/presente-infinito/ which tries (just visually through photos) to demonstrate that complicated and precarious relationship.
France has a "autoroute du soleil", too. suffered through many traffic jams in various AC-less shitboxes on my way to go skydiving in northern Spain. Fun times.
Italian geography is complex. There's a reason the allied forces took way longer from Naples to Milan than from Normandy to Berlin despite heavily outnumbering the Germans.
I was always super proud of the quality and maintenance of Italian highways. Somewhere around the turn of the century I stopped feeling as proud because maintenance started lacking and other countries that I visited (eastern Europe) has also built some very good roads.
One thing to notice though is that the highways are expensive.
From Rome to Milan in a small car you're paying around 60€s in tolls.
That's not a small price, especially as it is way higher than 15 day passes for all highways in some other central European countries.