The Giovanni XXIII road tunnel in Rome dips and rises excitingly while its gentle curves are an invitation to put the foot down. Even on my moped, it’s easy to see why this is Italy’s favourite place to break the speed limit.
The three-kilometre underpass linking neighbourhoods in the north of the city also has another quality to set the Roman pulse racing — it is a smooth stretch of asphalt in a city infamous for its potholes. Heading into the tunnel this week, I stick to a sedate 60km/h (37mph) as SUVs speed past me, defiantly nudging the limit.
Some 3,500 drivers were clocked speeding here, equal to six every ten minutes, in the four days after cameras were installed in the tunnel last April, with 154,000 fines handed out last year, over half the speeding fines issued in the whole of the city of Rome, according to government figures.
Not all Italians drive like James Bond during the opening chase in the 2008 film Quantum of Solace when he plays chicken with lorries on Lake Garda, but the country that invented the Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati knows a thing or two about fast cars.
It also knows about bad driving manners. When out on any Italian motorway obeying the speed limit I tend to spend a lot of time looking in the rear-view mirror as drivers sit on my tail, inches from my bumper, hoping to shove me out of the way so they can pass. In Rome, meanwhile, cars prang each other with alarming regularity.
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Italy is not at the top of the table in Europe for road deaths — that dubious honour falling to Bulgaria — but it beats the EU average with more than 3,000 dead in 2022 and a whopping 223,000 injured. A possibly cavalier attitude to road safety was evident in a new government video this week warning about driving while on the phone in which it was noted that none of the actors in the car was wearing a seat belt.
Northern Italians sometimes say it is southerners giving the country a bad reputation: an old joke states that traffic lights are the law in Milan, advice in Rome and Christmas decorations in Naples.
The city issuing the most speeding fines last year, totalling €146 million, was, however, Milan, while Florence, in central Italy, won on a pro-capita basis, with each resident handing over an average of €199. Road safety experts have said Italians are not even the only ones to blame, pointing out how Swiss motorists entering Italy immediately start driving faster because they think they can get away with it.
All that may stop as town halls across the country set up more speed cameras — 11,000 so far — although the reaction so far in northern Italy has been swift, and violent, with one mysterious vandal dubbed “Fleximan” earning folk-hero status last month after decapitating cameras with an angle grinder in the Veneto region.
It is hard not to be a bit sympathetic. When driving north from Rome on the Via Cassia, the speed limit constantly switches from 90 to 70km/h with few signs to let you in on the secret and cameras to catch you out. Italy’s bombastic transport minister, Matteo Salvini, has joined the uprising, accusing local mayors of erecting cameras on B roads outside their towns to make a fortune in fines.
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“Checking speed on roads at risk is useful, but they can’t be put everywhere, without any safety reason and only to tax workers and drivers,” Salvini said, as his ministry was apparently plotting to ban the use of speed cameras on roads where the speed limit was 50km/h or lower.
That has not gone down well with Giuseppa Cassaniti, head of Italy’s association of relatives of road accident victims. “If Salvini has a problem with mayors he should talk to them individually instead of making statements that encourage people like Fleximan,” said Cassaniti, 83, whose 17-year-old daughter was killed in 1997 by a car doing 111km/h in a 30km/h zone.
“In Italy people often think you can get away with speeding. So we need to be tougher and that means more controls, which means cameras,” she said.
