UK vs. Italy
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Italy, one of the three claimants for birthplace of the motorway - in the form of the Autostrade - and undoubtedly the European country that would win the award for most in love with their cars. In fact the only time an Italian is not in their car is when either drinking coffee or riding a scooter. Or sometimes, both.
What better place to start on Italy than its legendary Autostrade? Their equivalent to Autobahns, Interstates and Motorways have a special flavour of their own. This particular one is the A11 (Firenze to the west coast) close to Pistoia.
Most are two lanes wide. Most are narrow. Most have hair-raising traffic. Some lucky ones, like this one, have a hard shoulder. On the opposite carriageway, an electronic matrix sign is visible. These appear irregularly, usually before major exits. There are only three or four in thirty miles of A11. They are always on, usually saying exactly what this one is saying - the current time, and "moderate la velocita'" - moderate your speed.
Being Italians, image is everything, so there are flowering plants growing along the central reservation.
Twyford Down eat your heart out. Nothing stands in the way of progress, including this Romanesque Aqueduct, which survived perfectly intact for years until a couple of bulldozers broke a gap in it to allow the A11 to pass through. One wonders why environmentalists waste their time campaigning here when there are so much more destructive countries so close by!
Like many other Autostrade that aren't whizzing through mountain ranges, the A11 is completely flat and completely straight for absurdly long periods.
Road numbers are sacred in Italy. This single-track road to a village of maybe 50 people which lies 350m away is maintained by the local town council ('comune'). It not only has its own reference number, but this is signposted, as you can see.
The sign, translated, reads "Town Council of Gaiole-in-Chianti / SC26 / to Lucignano / 0.350km". SC stands for "Strada Comunale" or town council road.
Given that each town council has its very own network of numbered roads, it's quite easy to imagine the rampant bureaucracy involved with the next two classes up, Strade Provinciale (provincial roads) and Strade Statale (national roads). Though having said that, you have to see it to believe it.
We're now on the SS408 (Strada Statale 408). These are blessed with "Inizio" (start) and "Fine" (end) markers and every kilometre from the start have one of these, confirming both the road number and the number of kilometres from the start (or conversely, to the end, if you're coming the other way - the numbers only go in one direction). These are actually quite handy to reference a turning - "just after kilometre-post 11" is easier than "after the little corner to the right, where it goes down a bit, and then there's a big tree...".
Sometimes these kilometre-posts also have a small panel with distances to nearby towns on them. Frequently they are better maintained than directional or warning signs.
Cats-eyes are a rarity but all Strade Provinziale and Statale are blessed with these reflective bollards down both sides of the road every 25m - maintained obsessively so they're always there. The same rule applies with red and white markers as in Britain, though obviously swapped for right-side driving.
If that's not enough, this is the SS408's kilometre-post 11.1! Yes, every 100m another painstakingly measured and maintained marker appears to keep you informed of precisely where you are. It's quite beyond a joke. These tend to be kept in chack far more than direction signing, which tends to fall by the wayside - either dilapidated, updated piecemeal to produce a rainbow of fonts and faded colours, wrongly made (often in Arial) or just not there.
Strade Statale are sufficiently hallowed routes as to never move (more on this later). To pick one example out of the air, a section of the SS12 between Pisa and Lucca was replaced with a 'shortcut' reducing the length of the journey between the towns by about 5-6km. Nevertheless, the SS12 didn't budge and even today remains on its old long-way-round course. In fact, the new road is given the inferior sounding "SS12 raccordo" or SS12 link - despite it now being the main road. In fact, in many ways Strade Statale are like energy - they can neither be created nor destroyed, so the new fast road can't take the number SS12, can't have its own number and the old road can't be downgraded. A well thought out system.
We're not done with numbering yet. This is a turning off the SS408 onto the Gaiole-in-Chianti SC24. Not that it appears on signs - for all the care and time taken to make sure the numbered route is marked off every 100m and so on, the only sign actually telling you you're on the SC24 appears a short while after joining the road on a sign like that for the SC26 above. So what's the point in having the road numbered in the first place?!
Strade Statale and even Autostrade numbers are usually signed, but within a "shield" (a blue rectangle for Strade Statale, a green octogon for Autostrade) which forces the number inside to be so small as to be unreadable without stopping the car and getting out to have a look. The first time the number is readable is - you guessed it - when it's on a kilometre-post after already taking the plunge and joining the road.
Typical Italian signing here too - lots of tourist stuff, including a brown (tourist) and a blue (general direction) one for the same place. Finally, at the very bottom, is the sign for the town the road actually serves.
Fortunately, warning signs in Italy are usually good, though they do feel a need to warn drivers of the slightest risks and there seems to be no limit to the number of signs that can be placed within a given distance - on some roads the warnings are so frequent it's almost patronising.
This particular sign warns of deer "on all the road" - these are placed facing both directions after each cross road, turning, driveway... and this is just a Strada Comunale.
The most frequent warning came on Autostrade, country roads and city streets alike, in some cases religiously placed after every single entry point. A "slippery road" sign accompanied by plates representing rain and snow. Yes, that's right, when it rains or when it snows, the road is slippy!
The proliferation of warnings is quite a dangerous habit actually - it became all too easy to 'tune out' the signs because it became an incessant distraction, to the point that it's unlikely any of them did any good at all.
Here's an interesting one. This is a new section of bypass built on the SS2 between Siena and Roma. It seems that at one point there were plans to dual and grade-separate the whole road, but right now there's just the bypass there, connected by what would be slip roads at each end leading back to the old road. This struck me as unusual because the SS2 is actually moving off its original alignment through the town! The plans were probably for on-line dualling, only moving away from the original line at bypasses (which does seem to be allowed in numbering terms).
The plans have either been scrapped or put on hold for a while - in this photo we just came around a trumpet loop and in from the left, and have joined the main carriageway. Temporary barriers can be seen, and hidden beyond them, unused carriageway continuing for about a kilometre into the distance.
The same bypass, a few hundred metres on. The dashed line to the left is the end of the acceleration lane for the slip road where we joined. Further back is the bridge we crossed to reach the road.
What's interesting here is the build quality of the road. The bypass is fairly new (it looked about 5 years old) and yet is built no no better standards than Autostrade of the 1960s. There is no hard shoulder, a bumpy surface, high crash barriers (very intimidating while overtaking in narrow lanes) and hellishly tight interchanges. Initially I assumed that dual carriageways and Autostrade were usually like this because they were very old, but apparently this is still a good quality road in Italy!
To prove the point, here's something to compare it with - a dual carriageway built around the 1970s by the look of it linking Firenze and Siena. It too has narrow lanes, high crash barriers, a bumpy surface (at one point a speed limit of 70kmh is introduced where the road drops three feet and rises again within about 50m), lots of traffic, lots of lorries and screamingly fast traffic. There are plenty more roads where this came from. I'd like to be able to explain this away by saying this road is free, but the toll roads are usually as bad.
This photo was taken on a road exactly the same as the one above, linking Firenze with Pisa and Livorno. It replaces the SS67, but cannot have its number. So instead, it is called "Firenze-Pisa-Livorno", or FI-PI-LI for short. The sign pictured is a bridge marker (all are numbered prominently in the central reservation, but no mileage signs exist anywhere... something wrong there) which always contain the road number - the panel at the top would ordinarily read "SS34" or "A14". Similarly, the Siena-Firenze road is called "Siena-Firenze" or, yes, SI-FI. It would be possible to join them up and create a SI-FI-PI-LI.
This is the end result of having non-transferable road numbers: the SS2 is replaced by "SI-FI", the SS67 by "FI-PI-LI". These are limbo roads, with neither name or number, not a bypass but not a new route. The Italians aren't sure how to signpost them either. They were variously signed as "Autostrade", "Superstrade", "Raccordo SI-FI" (link), "4-Corsie" (four lanes), or just "FI-PI-LI". Sometimes the signs point to them as the Strada Statale they replace.
An anonymous Italian adds:
These signs were placed because some gangs were throwing stones off the bridges, targeting incoming cars. Police required them, so drivers can identify bridges rapidly.
The biggest problem with the FI-PI-LI was here, because the name lies. It doesn't go from Firenze to Pisa and Livorno - it goes to Pisa OR Livorno, because it forks into two separate branches at the end. And yes, both branches are also called FI-PI-LI as well. So what happens when they merge is four lanes try to pile into two lanes.
This is the merge point of the Pisa branch with the Livorno branch at 8:40pm on a Thursday night. Actually, "merge" is a rather strong word for it. What's actually happening is a free-for-all where the Livorno branch, which has it good being the main carriageway through the junction, is assaulted by traffic from Pisa which piles across the merge area into any space it can find. The car in the centre is, as you can see, currently driving across the painted merge nose. It was not alone in doing this.
As is usually the case, about three minutes after departing the scramble, there were no cars in front of or behind us.
And finally, an absolute wonder to finish on.
The Italians are known to be laid back, but at the same time they also manage to be highly bureaucratic and officious. I think this is sufficiently proven by the 100m markers above.
In a different, but no less absurd, vein, I present this image. This is taken at a place called Monteriggione, a few kilometres north of Siena. It's a tiny village with its own 'city' walls, and just outside the northern gate, I spotted this.
It's a dirt track one way system. But better than this, the track going left to right in this picture is signed as the "tangenziale" - ring road! The various (brand new) signs inform you you have left the limited traffic zone (the village) and must now go ahead or right, onto the one way dirt track. The mind boggles.
Martin Vlietstra writes:
It might be worth noting that the decimal part of the road location markers is given in Roman Numerals. For example, a road location marker with a "V" on it and a "12" beneath the "V" means 12.5km (a matter of when in Rome I suppose ...).
With thanks to Matteo for information on this page.
