Italy's Sun Motorway (2021)
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domusweb.it
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.
Anyway the ponte Morandi is not part of the autostrada del sole.
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
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, you'll likely bounce off the barrier and survive.
If you go over the edge of a national road at 70kmh you'll likely end up in a ditch/roll the car, dangerous at any speed.
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.
But I'd not call other roads "dangerous".
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.
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.
For example, one of the most common route in and out of Portugal (if not the most common), A25/E80, has no free alternative.
10 million vignettes sold, 40 CHF each, ~400M CHF gross revenue.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/what-you-need-to-know-...
12 billion CHF over 3 years, 4 billion a year, improving current roads and building new roads.
https://lenews.ch/2022/01/28/swiss-government-forecasts-12-b...
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.
Woah. I mean at that price it's not even noteworthy that the road is excellent - you just expect it.
It would be noteworthy if it was a bad road!
...if only the world was such a simple place...
Had to privatize in 1999, because you know, capitalism == good for the consumer, good for the environment, good for all...
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.
Just like any country. IMHO drivers from Switzerland are more terrible than those from Italy.
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 |
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.
That's a 200km difference.
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.
A big part of it is that the 407 is highly privatized and owned by offshore corporations, pension funds, investors, etc.
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 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!
We really enjoy the panoramic. The views are sometimes breathtaking.
"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.
The Autogrill ones were not terrible but not particularly good. Mostly just stale sandwiches with good quality ingredients.
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.
The food was absolutely amazing and it felt great to be away from the tourists for a bit.
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.
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 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.
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.
I would just say that it's missing some gas station and services but the road is good.