Italy Day 4, Castelfranco: Battling Italian Drivers

Friday, September 27

Castelfranco, Modena, Emilia-Romagna

Highlight: Mortadella, big chunks of mortadella!

Lowlight: Stress of driving in Italy

Today we left Pistoia and Toscana behind to travel north to Castelfranco in Emilia, crossing the Apennine Mountains in the process. Ann smartly chose Castelfranco because it sits on the rail line between Bologna and Modena, providing easy access to both those beautiful cities. Today, in all sincerity, was a day we would be happy forgetting.

Dinner from the Grocery Store

Let's start the tale by talking about the rental car. Neal did us a real solid the night we flew in by renting a car at the airport in Firenze at a fraction of the cost that we would have paid by booking via Hertz from the US. He got a larger car, a Jeep Renegade, a model not available in the US and this was the vehicle that he was driving when he picked us up at the airport and took us to their home above Pistoia.

Neal put the car in his name but could not add me as a driver to the rental contract without my driver's license. The plan was to stop by the airport and add me to the contract as we were leaving Tuscany for Emilia-Romagna. 

Our day started in the late morning after going to bed at 1am after our wonderful night out in Pistoia. At 11:30 we left for Firenze and the airport to deal with the car. Adding me to the contract proved to be a non-issue (of course, they did want an extra €10 per day to do so) and never once was I asked for my international driver's license, only my Oregon one.

Heretofore, I had not driven the Jeep at all. With all due sarcasm, it was fun trying to drive a 6-speed manual transmission in crazy Italian traffic. The clutch pedal has to come way off the floor to engage and that took a lot of getting used to. If nothing else, it makes starting the car on a hill that much more challenging. And Italy seems to be nothing but hills.

As well, the springs on the shifter are strong and push the shifter in neutral hard to the middle of the triple-H pattern between third and fourth. So I really had to be careful to hit the correct shift gates. Going from reverse to first was especially problematic, the springs pushing the lever towards the gate for third. My Toyota transmission was much easier to shift and I also had the clutch pedal adjusted to my liking, facilitating quick shifts.

We had to rely on a mapping program on the phone to get where we needed to go. And by following the directions from the rental car parking lot, we ended up in another paid parking lot adjacent to the airport. We had not yet come to understand the "just kidding!" aspect of the GPS directions. Often on roundabouts next to parking lots, the first exit will go into the parking lot while the second and subsequent exits go where you want to go. And when the GPS says to take the first exit, it isn't talking about the actual physical first exit. Later I would get in the habit of checking the directional signs just before the roundabout, when they bothered to post them.

Using Ed-logic, it would have been nice to see Italy via backroads rather than the autostrade. It sure would have been, but really, trying to get the GPS to select those roads was an exercise in frustration. We set out from the airport back to Pistoia in the hopes of taking the less-traveled SS64 in the direction of Modena rather than the A1 in the direction of Bologna.

It was nothing but a fustercluck trying to get to Castelfranco via backroads. I ended up driving in circles along the A11 with continual rerouting on the GPS. Between episodes of stalling the car trying to leave the toll booths along the A11 (we paid something like six tolls in our misadventure trying to leave Tuscany) we had great views of the landscape plant growers (shrub and tree) near Pistoia. This reminds me of tiny versions of the vast farms (Monrovia Nurseries comes to mind) in the Willamette Valley. Ultimately, with me being totally frustrated and Ann laughing hysterically at the insane situation, I gave up and took the autostrada. 

Besides the unfamiliar manual transmission, here are some of the things that made me a total stress monkey: signage I couldn’t read, crazy Italian drivers, long lines of slow trucks, no concept of where I was going, dodging speed and red light cameras, and struggling with the GPS. The GPS did provide a little entertainment: the pronunciation of Italian place names was comical in the extreme.

In my first day of driving in Italy, I got a crash course in what we came to call "spaghetti engineering." This is the practice whereby highway engineers (an oxymoron in Italy) apparently throw pieces of spaghetti at a map when planning a road. Where the spaghetti falls on the map, they trace it—coils, loops, squiggles, and all. This then becomes the course for the road. If you think I'm joking, you've clearly never driven in Italy.

I’m not going to even mention parking. I am pretty sure Italians have more parking rules than any other country and yet, they’ll park any place at any time in any direction, even on the damn sidewalk. While I am not mentioning parking, I will just say that parking spaces in Italy are made for tiny Fiats and even smaller vehicles, not the relatively huge 5-door Jeep that we were in.

Making progress north at long last, our trip on the A1 took us across the spine of Italy, the Apennines, which I hear are lovely. In dodging trucks and big German sedans flying at 160kph (100mph) with headlights flashing, I didn’t have much chance to look around in crossing the mountains. Also, much of the journey was kilometer after kilometer of tunnels through the mountains. Sadly, when I could glance at the mountains, it was foggy, gray, and overcast, not a pretty day. By the time we arrived in Emilia, it was uncomfortably warm and humid, definitely not the fall weather we were expecting. 

In checking with our host in Castlefranco, she had mentioned that a nearby shopping center had lots of free parking and that we should park there and walk the short distance to our apartment where she would meet us, if we would text her when we ready to check in. Free parking in Italy is something of a gilded unicorn and something not to be passed up, especially this huge American-style lot.

About 15:15 we arrived in Castelfranco, having apparently survived the speed cameras unscathed. On the way into town, Ann looked halfheartedly at the hosts' recommended places for dinner and concluded that nothing was interesting and that after the stress of the morning, all she wanted to do was get installed in the apartment and veg. I was wholeheartedly behind this plan and suggested that we grab groceries at the supermarket on our way to the apartment.

We went into the grocery store, a large supermarket by Italian standards, our first grocery shopping experience in Italy. No surprises here; the process is pretty similar to everywhere. I was drooling just looking at all the salume, especially the mortadella. Of course, at the deli counter, you can get them to slice it for you, but in the coolers, they offer the mortadella ends, cut into big chunks at unbelievably cheap prices. Welcome to Emilia-Romagna! We often buy salami ends here in the US, the leftover pieces that will not slice well on the automatic slicers.

After our day, wine was necessary and this store had a decent wine section organized by Bianchi, Rossi, e Spumanti. Within the rosso section, it was further organized by Nord, Centro, Sud, and the local section, Emilia-Romagna. This region of Italy is justifiably famous for its food but is not known for its wine. The very large local red section was over 90% red sparkling Lambrusco (curiously not in the spumanti section) with perhaps a dozen bottles of still red, mainly Cabernet. Although I wanted something local, I have never cared for Lambrusco no matter how well made and I didn’t come to Italy to drink Cab. It was pushing 16:00 and we hadn’t eaten yet at all today so I grabbed a known quantity from Tuscany, a Morellino di Scansano.

At checkout, we screwed up. I headed for an empty self-check line to avoid the longer lines at the staffed checkouts. But I wasn't thinking about our wine purchase. Self checkout requires you to scan your EU-issued driver’s license. Oops. We got the attention of the assistant and I showed her my Oregon drivers license. She took pity on us and overrode the ID scan.

We stopped at several stores during our three weeks in country, but this was our first time seeing that wine and food prices are very reasonable, especially by American standards and even more so compared to the super high food prices here in Bend. As examples, we got a fine bottle of Morellino di Scansano for €6,33 ($7) and a full-sized ciabatta loaf for €1,92 ($2.25). 

We left the car at shopping center and, thanks to Google Maps, we walked a long way out of our way on a hot and humid afternoon, dragging our luggage across cobblestones. Our host was surprised when we walked in from the wrong direction, having walked a half a mile rather than the 150 yards it should have taken. We were not in a good mood.

And our mood worsened as we entered our very cute modern second floor apartment to smell cigarette smoke from the chain smokers on first floor. We immediately made some lunch, then had a nap, and topped our day off with a bit of Netflix. We were exhausted and in no mood to explore Castelfranco, which seems to have very few touristic merits aside from being nicely situated on the rail line between Modena and Bologna.

Our first day on our own, a day of zero fun, was making us question our entire trip to Italy. But that was mainly our exhaustion talking. Our day would improve tomorrow, having nowhere to go but up.