After we were married, Chiara and I and some family and friends all drove down to Rome. We were numerous enough that we had to drive three separate cars and, with my father driving one of them, we were all but guaranteed to have problems of one kind or another.
First off, my father drives like an Italian. He drives fast; he drives aggressive; he drives with a kind of emotional certainty that every other motorist, every pedestrian, every feature of the road, and every traffic law is out to thwart him, personally.
I drive like an American who is extraordinarily nervous to be driving in Italy - and this is the surest way to incur the wrath and derision of every Italian motorist within a ten mile radius of my reasonably paced, turn indicating, hesitant-at-intersections automobile.
Now, add to this the either malfunctioning or sadistic GPS unit that we rented, along with the cars, from the counter at the airport. The device was one of those that could be attached to the windshield by a spittle-powered suction cup, specially designed to lose adhesion if you coughed, sneezed, changed lanes, or looked at it hoping to see a map with a helpful arrow displayed on it. It spoke in an antiseptic, rather snooty, English accent when it gave directions (which it only did when it was in the mood, and then often miles after they would have been useful) and because it had the voice of a woman, I could never escape the feeling that it was judging me, or nagging me to pull over and ask some GPS device on the side of the road for better directions.
Each of us had one of these aloof British women in our car, but only my father trusted her completely. He abdicated all responsibility for the operation of his vehicle to this prattling bitch and was content to follow her instructions off a cliff or through a field if she commanded it. It did not matter what highway signs told him or what we would scream into our cellphones as he barreled down some abandoned private road, if the GPS said left in 200 meters, my father turned left in exactly 200 meters.
Even this might have eventually led to a successful delivery of our personages at the hotel in Rome but for Rome itself.
Rome may be the loveliest city on earth. It's vivacious and alive, but also ancient and dilapidated (in the charming sense of the word, if there is one). It has more fountains than really seems necessary and enough churches to bore a nun. Every other building has a good restaurant and the shops overflow with an abundance of pointy shoes and orange pants. I love Rome. I'd live there. But I'll never drive there again.
First off, the roads are really just a warren of intertwining, cobblestone footpaths, seemingly rigged at every blind corner (and they're all blind corners) with some kind of large gun that expels Vespas at fifty miles per hour.
Then there are the street signs, which don't exist.
And finally there are the Romans themselves, who drive as though they are in a demolition derby but have been equipped with personal forcefields so that no collisions can ever take place - an astonishing technology that only seems to aggravate them further. They are a nation of formula one enthusiasts and they regard even a second's hesitation behind the wheel as weakness. The whole city is a wall-to-wall cacophany of honking and shouting over shaken fists. I felt like a hamster dropped into a rollerderby arena.
A Roman driver will cut in front of you if he or she is given roughly ten percent of the length of their car to work with. Inside three minutes, all of our cars had been split off from one another. The GPS was feeling especially moody it seemed and refused to speak at all once we passed the old Roman Empire era walls around the center of town.
I could sort of follow my father's low sedan up ahead when the road turned in just such a way, but when he turned down a street it was always a panic - would we or wouldn't we guess the right direction? Finally, four or five cars ahead of us, my father turned left, into a street blocked off with those heavy, saw-horse type road blocks and guarded by three carabinieri. I just screamed.
The carabinieri gesticulated wildly and hurled Italian at my father, who was speeding away down the closed street, and one took out a small notepad to write down the license plate information. I gawked for a split second and was jarred out of my reverie by the angry honking of the cars behind me. I drove on ahead, lamely hoping there'd be another way to get left right away to try to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of my father's driving.
Of course, Rome doesn't make half so much sense as that. Instead, we burrowed further and further into the city, past embassies and the river and monuments and the river again. Occasionally the GPS would chirp that I ought to take a sharp right turn into the Tiber or that we should drive a further 500 meters and then veer slightly right to plow headlong into an obelisk. The Cunt.
The final indignity, for me, was when, just at the moment I felt most frazzled and ineffective, we pulled up to a stoplight from which I had to either turn right or left and I didn't have a clue how to decide. I happened to glance to my left at the car pulling up next to me only to find myself mere inches from the smallest little red vehicle I'd ever seen being driven by a twelve year old boy. Another twelve year old boy sat in the passenger seat and, as I stared at them, the driver revved his engine (it sounded like an angry hornet in a jar) and quickly jutted his chin at me in what seemed to me to be a clear attempt at intimidation. The boy in the passenger seat just stared blankly at me - didn't even glance away when I caught his eyes with my own. I barked a laugh to keep from crying.
Finally, after several weeks and a brief consideration of cannibalism, we finally hit on the idea of hiring a cab driver to drive in front of us all the way to our hotel. Explaining this idea to the Italian cabbie required only a further six months.
Eventually, we pulled in front of the large former Russian embassy that was now our hotel, exhausted and full of sour hatred for the Eternal City. My father was there, waiting for us. Naturally, he was furious with me for not following him down the blockaded street.
And that reminded me of a particular detail of the whole ugly procession of the afternoon that had really been gnawing at me. Why had the blocked off street needed three carabinieri to guard it? Why, indeed, had it even need one? It had, after all, those big wooden sawhorse things. I asked Chiara and she screwed up her most quizzical expression and managed to twist it into one of derision smoothly - a feat managed, in my experience, only by Italians.
"Because otherwise," she began, staring at me like I was a rank imbecile, "otherwise, people would get out of their cars and move the barriers and drive down the street."
And this absolutely floored me, because I would have never even considered the idea of moving the road blocks. They could just as well have been something totally impassable, like a brick wall or a pit of lava or a strip of yellow tape that read 'do not cross.' I (and I imagine most Americans) see a road block and the message it imparts is crystal clear and invites no compromises:
"There is no longer a road here, you must go elsewhere."
But as much as it said something quaint and vaguely robotic me, it said something equally quaint and picaresque about Italians:
They actually had to position three police officers in front of two large wooden sawhorses blocking a street because, for an Italian, everything is just a puzzle to be solved or a game to be rigged. Imagine an entire civilization of schemers, wired on espresso and driven half batty by the inadequacy of their roads, and then imagine what that does to rush hour on a Friday.
My father, and Italy, it is not lost on me, has out Steve McQueened me.
At Least behind the wheel of a rented car in a foreign city.
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