Street Sign Language Lesson LVII

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In this round of Street Sign Language Lesson, we find Bud Spencer in the canned-bean aisle, learn the job description of an alpine sheepdog, get warned about a sobbalzo while walking in Bergamo, and encounter an organo in movimento in Milan. We also get watched by many eyes in Genoa, wait for medicine at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital, and read two lost-pet notices.

As usual, the signs start out as language lessons and wander off into film, shepherding, road paving, machinery, public transportation, hospital logistics, and dogs that look sort of like Beagles.  Let's begin.

Fagioli alla Bud Spencer. Ricetta originale.
"Bud Spencer-style beans. Original recipe."

The grammar isn't the interesting part here. Alla Bud Spencer simply means roughly "Bud Spencer style." The more interesting question for an English-speaking visitor looking at a can of beans in Carrefour might be: Who is Bud Spencer?

Bud Spencer was the screen name of Carlo Pedersoli, an Italian swimmer who represented Italy at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics before becoming an actor. In 1967, when he was asked to adopt an American-sounding name for an Italian western, he combined Budweiser, his favorite beer, with the surname of actor Spencer Tracy. His co-star Mario Girotti similarly became Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer and Terence Hill went on to become a hugely successful screen duo, especially in comic westerns and action films.

And the beans aren't random. Beans cooked in a pan became strongly associated with the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films, particularly the Trinità movies, enough that Italian food writing has referred to an entire comic "fagioli-western" tradition.

So, there is quite a lot packed into a €3.35 can sitting between the mushrooms and lentils. The label assumes you already know the joke.

Il cane da raduno raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore.
"The herding dog gathers and moves the livestock, following the farmer's instructions."

We liked this sentence because of the repetition: il cane da raduno raduna...

The noun raduno comes from radunare, meaning to gather or bring together. We usually encounter raduno referring to a gathering of people: un raduno degli Alpini, un raduno automobilistico, a rally, meet, or gathering.

Here, though, cane da raduno is literally a "gathering dog," what we would normally call a herding dog in English. Then comes raduna, the third-person singular of radunare: the gathering dog gathers. The Pasturs sign itself contrasts this job with that of il cane da protezione, whose task is to defend livestock against predators and other threats.

Then we get sposta, from spostare, "to move," and seguendo, "following": raduna e sposta il bestiame seguendo le indicazioni dell'allevatore = gathers and moves the livestock according to the farmer's instructions.

The distinction between the dogs took on a little more meaning after our recent long hike up the Vò Valley to Rifugio Tagliaferri, where we came across a herd of roughly 1,000 Pecora Gigante Bergamasca and spoke with the shepherd tending them. With that many sheep, radunare e spostare stops sounding like a vocabulary exercise and starts sounding like quite a job description.

Attenzione, sobbalzo di corsia.
A natural translation here would be something like “Caution: uneven lane surface” or “Caution: sudden change in lane level”.

We saw these signs while walking in Città Alta as a road was being resurfaced. Sobbalzo was new to us.

The noun sobbalzo comes from the verb sobbalzare. Treccani defines sobbalzare as making small repeated jumps or jolts, particularly when talking about a vehicle traveling over an uneven road. With a person, it can also mean to jump or start suddenly from surprise or fear. Sobbalzo is the resulting jolt or sudden movement.

So:

• La macchina sobbalza sulla strada sconnessa.
  The car jolts along the uneven road.
• Ho sobbalzato quando ho sentito il rumore.
  I jumped when I heard the noise.

What we like about sobbalzo is that it doesn't really name the physical bump or unevenness in the road. It names the jolt or sudden vertical movement produced by it. A car can sobbalzare when it hits an uneven patch of pavement, and that movement is un sobbalzo. So attenzione sobbalzo di corsia is effectively warning that the difference in road level may make your vehicle jump or jolt.  

 

Organo in movimento.

Moving part / moving machinery.

We saw these two signs in Milan. Our first reaction was to organo in movimento, which translated word for word gives us organ in motion. This sounds considerably more medical than mechanical.

But organo has a technical meaning in Italian. In machinery, an organo can be a component or functional part of a machine. Italian safety literature routinely uses expressions such as organi in movimento, organi ruotanti, and organi di trasmissione for moving, rotating, and transmission components.

The other question we had was whether in movimento means that the thing is moving right now, or that it could move.

Grammatically, it simply means "in motion." There is no "might" or future sense built into the phrase. But as a safety warning, organo in movimento is better understood as a category of hazard: moving part. The component does not have to be moving at the instant you read the sign, any more than an English "Caution: Moving Parts" label becomes false when a machine is switched off. The warning is that this thing moves when the system operates, so don't assume it will remain where it is

That is particularly useful information when the thing in question looks, at first glance, rather like part of the floor.

OCCHIO!
Watch out! / Careful!

We saw this AMT sign during our weekend in Genoa, a city where getting around can involve buses, elevators, funiculars, and a fair amount of vertical thinking.

Occhio literally means "eye," but by itself as an exclamation, Occhio! means Watch out!, Be careful!, or Pay attention! Treccani specifically lists it as an interjection used to call someone's attention to a danger.

You can also say:

• Occhio alla macchina!
  Watch out for the car!
• Occhio a dove metti i piedi.
  Watch where you step.

The AMT poster has fun with both meanings. It says: Tutti i mezzi AMT sono dotati di molti occhi, quelli delle telecamere e quelli di tutti noi. "All AMT vehicles are equipped with many eyes, those of the cameras and those of all of us."

So OCCHIO! is simultaneously "watch out" and an actual eye, reinforced by the camera lens sitting inside the eye in the image. It is one of those cases where the Italian is considerably more compact than the English explanation required to understand why it works.

A causa delle diverse modalità di trasporto la consegna potrebbe non rispettare la successione del numero di coda.

A fairly literal translation is: “Because of the different methods of transport, delivery may not follow the sequence of the queue numbers.” A more useful translation in context would be: “Because the medications arrive by different transport methods, they may not be dispensed in queue-number order.”

We encountered this sentence while waiting at the Farmacia delle dimissioni at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo. This is not simply a pharmacy conveniently located near the exit. After a patient is discharged from the hospital with a newly prescribed drug therapy that must continue at home, the Farmacia delle dimissioni can provide the drugs for the first treatment cycle, enough to bridge the period until care passes back to the patient's general practitioner. It also dispenses certain hospital and chronic-therapy medications.

So dimissioni here means hospital discharge, and Farmacia delle dimissioni is reasonably translated as discharge pharmacy.

The sign becomes easier once it is pulled apart:

• a causa delle = because of / due to
• diverse modalità di trasporto = different transport methods
• la consegna = the delivery or, here, dispensing of the medication
• potrebbe non rispettare = might not follow
• la successione = the sequence/order
• del numero di coda = of the queue number

The smaller sign underneath explains what is really going on: the medication kits are handed out in the order in which they arrive from the pharmacy warehouse, which may not match the order in which patients took their queue numbers.

There is even more machinery behind that sentence than we realized. Papa Giovanni uses an automated pharmacy warehouse and a pneumatic transport system to move some medication kits from the warehouse to the Farmacia delle dimissioni.

In other words, if you are number 46 and they call 48 first, this does not necessarily mean the Italian queue has finally abandoned all pretense of numerical order. Number 48's medicine may simply have arrived before yours.

We were already in the intellectually receptive state produced by sitting around watching a hospital queue display, so naturally we photographed the explanation.

Avvistata l'ultima volta nella chiesa di Sant'Alessandro di via Pignolo.

Last seen in the church of Sant'Alessandro on Via Pignolo.


This was a notice for a missing black-and-white cat. What was that cat doing in the church?

The useful verb here is avvistare, from vista. It means to sight or spot something, traditionally with the sense of beginning to see or recognize something from a distance. It turns up particularly in contexts such as sighting a ship, aircraft, person, or something being searched for.

The full sentence could be: È stata avvistata l'ultima volta... She was last seen... On the notice, è stata disappears and we are left with the compressed: Avvistata l'ultima volta...

Also note that it is avvistata, feminine, because the missing animal is una gatta.

English normally reduces the whole idea to the very ordinary "last seen." Italian's avvistata feels closer to last spotted or last sighted, which seems particularly appropriate when everyone in the neighborhood has temporarily become part of a cat-search operation.  

Light a candle in your local church for this cat.

Simil Beagle, femmina, taglia medio/contenuta.
Beagle-like female, small-to-medium size.

This was another missing-animal notice, this time for Bella (who prefers shopping at LIDL over churches?).

The interesting word is simil. It isn't the adjective simile with the final e casually dropped. Simil- is a combining form derived from simile and is used to indicate something with characteristics resembling something else. Treccani gives examples such as similpelle, imitation or synthetic leather.

So simil Beagle means Beagle-like, resembling a Beagle, or, more loosely in English, Beagle type.

We might be tempted to translate it as "Beagle mix," but that says slightly more than the Italian does. Simil Beagle describes appearance or type; it doesn't necessarily make a claim about Bella's actual parentage.

It's useful shorthand for a lost-dog sign. If you don't know exactly what she is, but she looks enough like a Beagle that "Beagle" will help someone recognize her, simil Beagle gets the job done.

The Sound of Convenience

The Sound at 23:50 ~ Buying a Ticket ~ Why Is the Plane Awake? ~ 

The Sound Ledger ~ It's the Freight, Stupid ~ What Does Convenience Cost?

An apologetic flight taking off
over Bergamo at night

The Sound at 23:50

Bergamo, 23:50, a low roaring rumble. Then silence. Another one follows. Eventually, things quiet down. At 05:30, it starts again.

What we first thought was an aberration of a late or early flight here and there has become something we recognize as part of the acoustic day in Bergamo. We live near Milan–Bergamo Airport, the third busiest airport in Italy. As the crow flies, we are about 3.5 kilometers from the runway. Most of the time we hardly think about it. At other times, especially late at night or early in the morning, it sounds as if the airport is next door.

The sound isn't necessarily enormous. During the day it would probably disappear into everything else: cars, motorcycles, construction, voices from the street, bells. But at 11:50 at night the city has mostly gone quiet, and the sound of an airplane climbing out of Bergamo has the sky largely to itself. The same is true around 05:30 in the morning, when the first departures begin before much of the city has properly started its day.

After a while, we began to notice the pattern. Why so many planes at precisely these edges of the day? Who wants to leave Bergamo at six in the morning? Who wants to arrive somewhere close to midnight?

At first these were idle questions prompted by lying in bed listening to airplanes. Then we started looking for flights ourselves.

Buying a Ticket

One evening recently, we were looking at tickets on Ryanair. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the dashed hope of truly low-cost flying unless you travel with a backpack and are prepared to wear five layers of clothes onto the plane.

We were looking at tickets to Pescara: departure at 05:50. Later looking at tickets to Helsinki: departure at 06:30. Arrivals back in Bergamo from these destinations were late evening, close to midnight. Slide forward or back a day or two, and the choices often seemed to stay at the edges of the day: very early in the morning or very late at night. 

These are just two examples. We’ve seen the same pattern with other destinations from Bergamo: departures and arrivals clustered around hours when most reasonable people are either still asleep or thinking about going to sleep.

There was probably a time when we would have shrugged and booked the flight anyway. A cheap ticket was a cheap ticket. Get up at 03:30, stumble into a taxi, arrive at the airport before sunrise, and recover later. These days, we are much less willing to organize an entire trip around an unpleasant flight time. We have changed days, changed destinations, chosen another airline, chose another mode of arriving, or simply abandoned an idea because the available flights were too early or too late.

And then came a realization.

The airplanes disturbing our sleep and the flights we routinely refuse to book might be part of the same phenomenon, viewed from opposite sides of the booking window.

At home, we hear the 11:50 departure climbing into the night and think, ah noisy. On the Ryanair website, we see the 05:50 departure and think, ah absolutely not.

The question became: Why are flights scheduled at the edges of the day?

Why Is the Plane Awake?

Our first theory was obvious enough: perhaps the early-morning and late-night slots were cheaper. Ryanair is famously focused on keeping costs down, and its own annual reports say that it favors airports with competitive charges and negotiates aggressively over airport and handling costs. Secondary and regional airports can also offer fewer slot restrictions than larger primary airports.

So maybe 05:50 was simply the bargain hour.

Except, at least at Bergamo, we couldn't find evidence for that. The airport published charges and fee schedules don’t indicate any special discount for taking off at 05:50 in the morning or 23:50 at night. Ryanair certainly cares about airport costs, but cheap airport and cheap time of day are not the same thing.

Slot availability is another possible factor. A flight leaving Bergamo early may need to arrive at another airport at a particular time, and the same aircraft has to fit into a whole day's sequence of flights. There are crews, airport restrictions, passenger demand, and the schedule at the other end to consider. It isn't as simple as Ryanair sitting in Bergamo and deciding that 05:50 is a particularly amusing time to send us to Pescara.

But the explanation that we kept coming back to was aircraft utilization.

An airplane is an expensive piece of machinery, and it only earns money when it is being used. In its 2025 fiscal year, Ryanair reported an average of 9.57 flight hours per aircraft per day (see Ryanair Holdings plc, Annual Report FY2025, Key Performance Indicators section, available at https://investor.ryanair.com). The figure isn't uniquely high. Some airlines, including other low-cost carriers, report even greater utilization. But Ryanair reports it as a key operating statistic, which tells you something about how important it is to the business.

A long working day for an airplane has consequences. If you want to squeeze several flights out of the same aircraft, somebody has to be on the first flight of the day and somebody has to be on the last.

The 05:50 departure begins to make more sense when you stop thinking of it as our flight to Pescara and start thinking of it as the first movement in an aircraft's entire working day. That plane may return to Bergamo and head somewhere else, return and leave again. The unattractive hour for us may be what makes another flight possible later in the day.

In other words, the plane is awake because it has work to do. And suddenly the roar at 23:50 starts to make a little more sense.

The Sound Ledger

It turns out that in the bureaucracy of Italian aviation, our annoyance at the 23:50 flight has already been anticipated, has a formula, and is extensively measured.

Italy measures airport noise using an indicator called LVA (Livello di Valutazione del rumore Aeroportuale) (see SACBO / Milan Bergamo Airport environmental noise page), roughly the Airport Noise Assessment Level. LVA isn't the decibel reading of one airplane flying overhead. It is an overall measure designed specifically for airport noise. The annual LVA is calculated from 21 observation days: three weeks selected during different parts of the year, with the highest-traffic week used in each period. During those weeks, noise is measured continuously. See following Italy’s DM 31.10.1997 (article 1) for methodology for measuring airport noise.

From the May 2026 data (from the linked noise page above), Bagnatica and Seriate show some of the highest noise levels (mid-to-high 60s dB(A)). Bagnatica and Seriate are noisier because they sit directly under the runway 28 (heading toward 280 degrees) arrival path, and arrivals consistently come from the east. Given Bagnatica's position beneath the Runway 28 approach, much of that exposure comes from low-altitude arrivals from the east. Arrivals can come from the west (Runway 10, landing toward 100°) and land eastward at Bergamo, but it is rare.

 

Monitoring stations around the Bergamo airport

Bagnatica’s numbers give a hint of what it feels like to live under the runway 28 arrival path. In May, the station recorded a minimum LVAj of 58.3 dB(A) and a maximum of 70.1 dB(A)—an 11.8 dB spread that is not just a technical fluctuation but a substantial difference. Sound is logarithmic, and a 10 dB increase is often perceived, for comparable sounds, as roughly twice as loud. But LVAj is not a continuous background-noise reading: it summarizes the accumulated effect of aircraft events during the day. In other words, Bagnatica is not sitting under a steady 70 dB roar. What changes is the frequency, intensity, and cumulative impact of aircraft passing overhead.

We are glad we are not in bed in Bagnatica. But someone is.

And the LVA formula makes an important distinction between day and night.

For LVA calculations, daytime runs from 06:00 to 23:00 and nighttime from 23:00 to 06:00. Noise events occurring at night receive an additional penalty, meaning that—within the LVA index—a single nighttime aircraft event can influence the result roughly as much as ten comparable daytime events. Note: the Bagnatica numbers cited above are daily averages. The day/night numbers are not published. A nighttime LVAn could theoretically exceed 70 dB(A) at Bagnatica, but the bulletin’s published numbers would not show it — they only show the combined daily LVAj.

The airplane at 23:50 isn't literally ten times louder than the airplane at 11:50. The multiplier is there because context matters. At noon, an aircraft competes with traffic, voices, construction, motorcycles and the general noise of a city going about its business. Near midnight, the same aircraft has the stage largely to itself. More importantly, people are trying to sleep.

Bergamo has quite an elaborate system for keeping track of all this. SACBO, the company that operates Milan Bergamo Airport, runs eight permanent noise-monitoring stations, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, supplemented by two mobile stations. The system combines microphone readings with radar tracks, weather information, and flight logs so that individual noise events can be associated with aircraft movements. The results are analyzed monthly, published publicly, and periodically checked by ARPA Lombardia.

Three of the fixed stations are actually within the Comune di Bergamo: Via Linneo, Via Quasimodo and Via Colognola ai Colli. The other five are in surrounding communities: Orio al Serio, Bagnatica, Seriate, Grassobbio and Azzano San Paolo.

In other words, it’s not just me hearing the noise, there are microphones scattered around listening to it too. But the microphones don't need a good night's sleep.

Bergamo also has Noise Abatement Procedures intended to reduce the impact of aircraft on surrounding communities. Of particular importance for the city are restrictions on nighttime departures using Runway 28, the westward departure direction, during the 23:00 to 06:00 period. Exceptions can be made for weather, unusual traffic conditions, or operational safety, and ENAC can sanction airlines for violations of the procedures.

So, it would be unfair to say that Bergamo does nothing about aircraft noise. In fact, when it comes to monitoring and mitigation, the airport appears to take the issue quite seriously.

But monitoring noise and preventing noise are two different things. This is where a few comparisons with other European airports heavily associated with low-cost flying make that distinction clearer.

• At Brussels South Charleroi Airport (curfew info), there is a curfew between 23:00 and 06:30, together with a quota system for late operations, restrictions on the noisiest aircraft, noise thresholds and fines when airlines exceed them. The surrounding region has also carried out a large soundproofing program for affected buildings.
• At Eindhoven Airport, scheduled flights have not been allowed after 23:00 since October 2020, apart from limited provisions for delayed arrivals. The airport also caps the total number of flights and charges lower airport fees for quieter aircraft.
• London Stansted, one of Ryanair's largest bases, takes yet another approach. It continues to allow nighttime flying, but the British government imposes both a limit on the number of aircraft movements and a separate noise quota during the core nighttime period. The current regime, running from October 2025 through October 2028, retains those controls. In other words, even if quieter aircraft makes more flights possible, there is still a ledger keeping track of both the number of flights and the amount of noise they collectively produce.

Bergamo has chosen a somewhat different balance. It measures extensively, publishes the measurements, uses special flight procedures and restricts certain nighttime runway operations. But it does not have the broad nighttime curfew found at Charleroi or the prohibition on scheduled flights after 23:00 used at Eindhoven. Compared with those airports, Bergamo seems stronger on mitigation than on prevention.

And that seems important. The 05:50 departure isn't simply an unavoidable fact of low-cost aviation. Similar airports have drawn the line in different places.

How much of the airline's long working day a community is willing to hear is, at least partly, a choice.

It's the Freight, Stupid

At this point, we thought we had the story more or less figured out. We live near a major low-cost airline hub. For example, Ryanair sells tickets at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight. Its airplanes work long days. We hear airplanes at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight.

Case closed.

Except it wasn't.

While looking through SACBO's noise information, we came across reports of nighttime departures from Runway 28. Runway 28 sends aircraft westward (280 degrees), in the general direction of Bergamo, and its use for departures between 23:00 and 06:00 is restricted. SACBO publishes lists of the flights authorized to use this runway during those hours because of weather, air-traffic conditions, safety or other permitted circumstances.

We opened one of the reports, from 2020, expecting to see Ryanair flight numbers everywhere. Instead, a surprising number of flights were cargo and courier operations.

This required a recalibration of our theory.

The report doesn't tell us that all, or even most, nighttime flights at Bergamo are cargo flights. It covers a specific subset of nighttime departures from a specific runway, and 2020 was hardly a normal year for aviation. But it was enough to remind us that the roar we hear in bed cannot automatically be blamed on the person flying to Pescara for €29.99.

There is another wrinkle in using 2020 as our window into freight traffic. DHL, once a major courier presence at Bergamo, was in the process of moving its air hub operations to Malpensa, where its new international hub began operating in 2020 and was formally inaugurated the following year. Cargo traffic at Bergamo subsequently fell substantially. Today, UPS is the airport's principal established courier operator, flying from Bergamo to its European hub in Cologne and other destinations. There are also smaller logistics operators handling, among other things, e-commerce traffic between China and Italy.

2020 also appears to be the last year for which SACBO published these Runway 28 nighttime lists. Another small mystery for a layperson to wonder about.

SACBO has stated that Bergamo’s future in cargo lies in becoming a specialized e‑commerce logistics hub — focusing on fast, efficient courier operations rather than competing with Malpensa’s large‑scale freight volumes. (L’Eco di Bergamo, Bergamo News). I hope efficient means less noise.

Freight has its own reasons for liking the night, because express cargo works particularly well while the rest of us are sleeping. Packages collected during the day can be flown to sorting hubs overnight, moved again, and arrive somewhere else in time for another day's deliveries. For passenger airlines, the edges of the day help extend the productive life of an aircraft. For express freight, the night itself is part of the product. Yesterday's package is supposed to become today's delivery.

Cargo operations can also have different "acoustic characteristics". Freighter fleets tend to include older aircraft than passenger fleets, in part because passenger aircraft often spend a second career carrying freight. Older generations of aircraft generally have larger noise footprints than their newer counterparts. At Bergamo, meanwhile, a growing share of passenger traffic is flown by newer aircraft such as Ryanair's Boeing 737 MAX, which SACBO's own measurements show to be several decibels quieter than the older 737-800.

It would be tempting to turn this into another overly simple explanation: cargo airplanes are old, heavy and loud; passenger airplanes are new, light and quiet. A cargo aircraft isn't necessarily heavier than a passenger aircraft, and carrying freight doesn't inherently require more thrust or make an airplane noisier. Aircraft type, age, engine technology, actual takeoff weight, weather and operating procedure all matter.

What is different is the timing. Cargo and express-delivery networks have a strong economic reason to use hours that passenger airlines and passengers might prefer to avoid.

And so, our neat story about the sound of low-cost flying became messier.

Some of the early-morning sound really may be the Ryanair flight we saw on the booking screen. Some of the nighttime roar may be freight moving through the European logistics system. Both use Bergamo Airport. Both have reasons to stretch activity toward hours when much of the surrounding community is asleep.

The common denominator isn't Ryanair and other low-cost passenger airlines after all. It's an airport working around the clock.

What Does Convenience Cost?

By now, our original theory had become considerably less tidy. Maybe what we are hearing isn't simply the sound of low-cost flying. Maybe it's the sound of convenience.

We want inexpensive flights to Helsinki. We also want the thing we ordered online to appear at our door tomorrow. Neither expectation seems particularly remarkable anymore. Behind both, however, are complicated systems trying to squeeze time out of the day.

Online shopping in Italy has changed enormously. The Osservatorio eCommerce B2C at Politecnico di Milano/Netcomm reports that Italian online purchases were €16.6 billion in 2015. In 2016, product purchases alone were €9 billion. For 2025, the same research group put total e-commerce above €62.3 billion, with products above €40 billion.

Not all those packages fly, of course. Many don't. And we can't draw a straight line from Italian e-commerce growth to freight traffic at Bergamo. In fact, cargo flights at the airport are much less numerous today than they were before DHL moved its courier operation away from Bergamo in 2020. But overnight freight remains part of the airport's activity, and the larger logistics system exists because we use it.

It's easy to complain about a Ryanair departure at 05:50 when we don't want to take it. It's also easy to complain about an airplane passing overhead at midnight. It's harder when we recognize ourselves somewhere in the demand that keeps the entire system running.

Bergamo Airport works hard. In 2025, SACBO handled nearly 17 million passengers, more than 104,000 aircraft movements, and about 24,500 tonnes of freight. The airport officially operates on a 24‑hour basis, and its development planning — as reflected in ENAC’s approved masterplan — is built around distributing annual traffic across the full H24 operating day. (See SACBO).

But there is another piece of infrastructure immediately beside it: Bergamo, where people live.

That brings us back to the question we stumbled into while listening to airplanes in bed: where should the productive day of an airport end and the sleeping day of a city begin?

One obvious answer would be a curfew. But Bergamo doesn't have one.

We wondered whether that was simply because Bergamo has only one runway and needs to squeeze as much traffic as possible through it. A single runway does certainly create pressure to use the available hours efficiently. Yet it doesn't make nighttime operations inevitable.

Eindhoven has one runway and closes to scheduled flights at night. Charleroi also operates a single runway and normally closes between 23:00 and 06:30. Stansted, another huge Ryanair base with one runway, remains open through the night but operates under government limits on both the number and cumulative noise of nighttime flights.

So, Bergamo's 24-hour operation isn't simply an engineering necessity imposed by having one strip of asphalt. It is also a choice about how that infrastructure is used.

We couldn't find an official SACBO or ENAC statement saying, in so many words, Bergamo has no curfew because... And perhaps there isn't one simple answer. A curfew would reduce operating flexibility. It would constrain passenger schedules and overnight freight. It could push flights into already busy periods immediately before and after the closure, move some activity to other airports, and ultimately make some services more expensive or less attractive.

Those are real costs.

But allowing flights through the nighttime has costs too. They simply appear somewhere else on the ledger.

There are ways of drawing the line short of closing the airport. Night flights can be capped, as at Stansted. Airlines can pay more to operate at noise-sensitive hours or with noisier aircraft. Airports can give preference to newer, quieter planes. Certain runway directions can be restricted, as Bergamo already does. Homes can be insulated and noise continuously monitored, also things Bergamo already does.

In other words, there isn't a choice between having an airport and not having an airport. There are many choices in between those extremes. And that's perhaps where this investigation finally landed.

Low-cost airlines aren't the villain. Freight isn't the villain. Nor are those of us who like inexpensive flights and packages arriving at the door. The interesting question is how we divide the benefits and costs of all that convenience.

Commerce would happily use all 24 hours of the day. Human beings tend to reserve a few of them for sleeping.

At 23:50 in Bergamo, we can sometimes hear where that line has been drawn and not be happy with it.

Foreign at Ciao: Ten Years of Speaking Italian

One World is Enough ~ The R Bar ~ The Woman Who Disappeared ~ 

What Our Italian Can Do ~ My Grandfather Was American ~ Foreign at Ciao

 

We enter a bar, a shop, or an office and say ciao.

“Di dove siete?”

One word is often enough. We haven't ordered, explained our problem, or asked where the bathroom is. Nonetheless, the international portion of the conversation has begun.

This is not a big deal in the scheme of things. The question is usually friendly, and often it leads somewhere interesting. We have met people, exchanged travel stories, and explained many times how two Americans ended up living in Bergamo. Still, after ten years, there are mornings when we would prefer simply to order a macchiato.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that we write about our odyssey with the Italian language. We have dozens of posts (TravelMarx: Italian Language) on the subject. We love Italian, we love living in Italy, and our lives here would be impossible without the language. But affection does not eliminate frustration.

After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

One Word is Enough

“Where are you from?” after a single ciao demonstrates how quickly we can be identified and sorted. The question may be nothing more than curiosity or an easy way to make conversation. Repeated hundreds of times, however, curiosity can begin to feel a little like border control that you weren't expecting.

What tires us is not being foreign. We are foreign. It is the speed with which foreignness can become the subject, pushing aside whatever we were trying to say or do. How we pronounce the words becomes more interesting than the words themselves.

Italy has a highly tuned linguistic ear. Italians identify one another by pronunciation, vocabulary, rhythm, and regional cadence. A few sentences may reveal that someone is Bergamasco, Roman, Neapolitan, Sardinian, educated, provincial, working class, or trying rather hard not to sound like any of those things. Italians are not only locating foreigners through language. They have long been locating one another.

The difference is that a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent places us outside it.  We can get placed "outside" of Italy anywhere from Germany, the Netherlands, England, or the US. It's a slight chuckle on our part when we asked if we are German.

We touched on this feeling in Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad, where we described our accent as a kind of passport carried in our voices. That post considered the larger experience of living between cultures. In this post, we want to stay with one small but persistent part of it: how a single ciao can locate us before the conversation has really begun.

That may be all that is happening after ciao: a person hears something unexpected and asks a natural question. But repeated over years, the exchange begins to carry a little more weight. It reminds us that we may participate fully in the conversation while never becoming acoustically invisible within it.

The R Bar

The Italian r has become our recurring symbol of linguistic struggles.  Someone rolls an extravagant r for us. We try to reproduce it. What comes out is recognizably an r, but not the correct kind. Everyone laughs, including us. Then we try again, with greater concentration and usually worse results.

Repeat for ten years.

The joke is affectionate. We understand that. Often the person correcting us is genuinely trying to help, and we would not want people to stop correcting us altogether. The tiring part is how easily the correction can take over the conversation. We may be explaining something complicated, making a joke, or telling a story, but one poorly executed r suddenly becomes the most interesting thing at the table. The message briefly disappears behind the delivery.

In that moment, the Italian r seems to outweigh years of vocabulary, grammar, residence permits, utility bills, medical appointments, friendships, misunderstandings, and daily life. We may have explained the problem perfectly, but we have not rolled the r with sufficient authority.

Perhaps this does not mean we failed to work hard enough. Adult learners vary greatly in their ability to perceive and reproduce unfamiliar sounds, and late learners (like us) commonly retain a non-native accent even at high levels of proficiency. According to the research A hypothesis on improving foreign accents by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits adults learn foreign pronunciation poorly because they stop experimenting too soon and the result is a foreign accent. (This is research to follow up on!)

Many people like us who learn a language later in life retain an accent even when they speak fluently. At some point, the mouth seems to settle on its preferred collection of sounds. Ours settled before it encountered the Italian r.

The Woman Who Disappeared

We went to a party recently where many of the guests had international backgrounds. One English woman had lived in Italy for more than twenty years. She had married an Italian, raised children here, studied languages, and could move easily between English and Italian.

A few days later, a friend who had attended the same party remarked on how perfectly she spoke. He had to listen closely to tell that she was not Italian.

His admiration was generous, and deserved. Still, I felt a brief flash of envy. Apparently, there was a finish line after all, and we haven't passed it (yet).

The English woman had achieved a kind of native invisibility. Her Italian no longer announced her before she had a chance to say anything else. She could enter a conversation without immediately becoming the foreign person in it.

Do we want the same thing?

Yes and no.

We do not necessarily want to disappear. The way we speak is part of who we are and how we think. Our accents record where we came from, when we learned Italian, and the fact that another language still lives close beneath the surface.

But we would like the option to disappear now and then.

Sometimes we want to say ciao, order a coffee, and not explain how two Americans ended up in Bergamo. Sometimes we want the conversation to continue without turning toward our pronunciation, our origins, or the inevitable question: “Why Bergamo?”

What Our Italian Can Do

It is easy to measure our Italian by what it cannot do.

It cannot disguise us. It cannot reliably roll an r. It cannot always keep pace with a crowded dinner table when three people are speaking at once and a fourth is beginning a story from the middle.

But isn't this a strange way to measure your language ability?

Thinking about the woman at the party also forced us to take stock of what our own Italian can do.

It has built a life. It gets us through bureaucracy, friendships, driving exams, meals, repairs, jokes, and misunderstandings. It allows us to participate, not perfectly and not invisibly, but fully enough to belong to the life we are living. That's all good.

Also, our language level has allowed us to notice things we would otherwise miss. We hear differences between formal and informal speech. We recognize regional expressions. We stop at signs and wonder why Italian phrases an instruction one way while English would phrase it another. We may not speak like native Italians, but we no longer experience Italian as noise passing around us and because of our gap, we notice more. Or, that's our hope!

There are, of course, limits. In a fast conversation, we may arrive at the perfect response several seconds too late. A joke may need to be explained, which is rarely an improvement. Some days our Italian feels fluent; on others, we struggle to assemble a sentence we are certain we used successfully the day before.

Still, "medium-level Italian" may be an unfair description. Medium compared with what? A native speaker? The English woman at the party? An imaginary version of ourselves who studied the congiuntivo (subjuncitve) every evening instead of doing something else?

Perhaps the more useful measure is not whether we can pass as Italian, but whether our Italian language level allows us to participate in the life around us. And by that measure, it works.

Our Italian is imperfect, accented, and occasionally held together with gestures. It is also durable. It gets us through the day and into conversations, relationships, and situations that would otherwise remain closed to us. That may not be mastery. It is not invisibility. But it is much more than nothing.

My Grandfather Was American

The United States is hardly innocent when it comes to judging people by the way they speak. Accents can affect how people are treated at work, in public, and in everyday conversation. Race and class are often tangled up in those judgments. Someone can be born in the United States and still be asked where they are "really" from.

Still, that was not how I understood American identity growing up.

My grandfather was born in the United States to Italian parents. He spoke and wrote English imperfectly and was possibly illiterate. In an earlier post, A Happy Sound in the Grotto, I wrote about the sounds he made while sitting at the kitchen table, working slowly through the newspaper. His limited literacy was part of his history. It was never evidence that he was somehow less American. He did not have to pass linguistically.

Perhaps that is because the United States tells itself that it is a country made from arrivals. The story is often contradicted by the country’s behavior, but the story still matters. An accent may identify someone as Italian American, Chinese American, Southern, Midwestern, working class, or recently arrived. It can place a person within a complicated American landscape without necessarily removing them from it.

Italy tells itself a different story, one built more around place, family, town, region, and inherited culture. This is curious because Italy contains enormous linguistic variety. Italians have always used pronunciation and vocabulary to locate one another. Yet a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent more often seems to raise the prior question of whether we belong inside the category at all.

That may be too simple a comparison. Perhaps I remember the United States generously because it was where I grew up and experience Italy more critically because I am still learning how to inhabit it. Perhaps this is rosy retrospection with an American accent?

But the difference continues to feel real.

My grandfather’s imperfect English did not make his nationality conditional. Our imperfect Italian can sometimes make our connection to Italy feel provisional, even after ten years of living here.

Maybe that is the question beneath all the questions that follow ciao: not simply where we came from, but how a person who came from somewhere else can ever become fully from here.

Foreign at Ciao

So, where are we in this discussion? After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

Fine.

We may never be mistaken for Italians, at least not once we open our mouths. But being mistaken for Italian may be the wrong measure.

The woman at the party could pass. We cannot. Yet passing is only one form of belonging, and perhaps not the most important one. A perfect accent can conceal a history. An imperfect one can reveal it in interesting ways.

Our accents record lives lived in two languages. They tell people that we arrived from somewhere else and learned Italian later. They do not tell them how long we've been here, what we understand, what we contribute, or how thoroughly we have made Italy home.

Perhaps this is what people are trying to discover when they ask where we are from. The question may be less a judgment than an opening, an attempt to place us within the story they already understand.

Still, there is a difference between being welcomed and being unremarkable.

We have been welcomed. That is for sure. We have built friendships, routines, and a life in Italian. We participate fully, even if we do so audibly as foreigners. What we may never achieve is the ordinary privilege of passing unnoticed. But, there are worse things in life.

Remaining recognizable as ourselves while living in another language may be a more modest achievement than mastery, but it is also a more interesting one. We do not need our Italian to erase where we came from. We need it to carry us further into where we are.

Even if, immediately after ciao, we are sometimes asked to explain the whole journey before we have managed to order the macchiato.

A Hike to Rifugio Fratelli Longo and Lago Diavolo from Carona

Overview ~ The Route ~ Resistance ~ Rifugio Longo ~ 

Water, Dams, and Electricity ~ A Final Thought ~ Flora

  

Left: View from the Lago Diavolo dam looking west.

Center: View from trail 208 - looking east.
Right: Rifugio Longo with green backdrop.

On a warm July Sunday, we headed up to Alta Val Brembana for a hike to Rifugio Fratelli Longo and Lago Diavolo. We stopped in Branzi (of cheese fame) for a coffee before continuing on to Carona and parking.

Starting in Carona, we followed a combination of CAI trails 210, 209, 208, 224, and 258 in a loop that took us through forests, past reservoirs and waterfalls, and into one of the most historically interesting valleys in the Bergamasque Alps. The hike ended, as many of our hikes do, with an excellent lunch at the rifugio. This is one of the few rifugi we haven’t been to in the Orobie, so it was nice to get a chance to visit.

Overview

Length: 19.7 km
Elevation Gain: ~1,010 m
Duration: 7 hours total including lunch, 4 hours 51 minutes moving time
Highest Point: 2,142 m
Starting Point: Carona (1,189 m)
Destination: Rifugio Fratelli Longo (2,026 m) and Lago Diavolo

The Route

We started in Carona (here) on CAI trail 210, a mostly paved service road that climbs steadily into the valley. Around the third kilometer we left the road and took CAI trail 209, a forest trail that climbs through the trees to meet trail 208, the Sentiero delle Orobie Occidentali. From there we continued on trail 224 to Rifugio Longo.

After reaching the rifugio, we continued up to Lago Diavolo, one of the iconic alpine lakes of the Orobie. The lake sits beneath rugged peaks and beside a dam that today holds back the alpine waters. Today, the lake looked pretty low to our eyes. 

We returned to the rifugio for lunch before descending on trail 258, a narrower and more interesting trail that drops into the valley and follows portions of an old aqueduct before reconnecting with trail 208 and eventually Carona.

One of the highlights of the day was encountering a large herd of Bergamasca Sheep. Seeing roughly 1,500 animals spread on a steep slope under the trees felt like stepping into another century. The Bergamasca breed originated in the valleys around Bergamo and remains closely associated with pastoral life in Val Brembana. The shepherd spoke a broken Italian indicating he was from somewhere else. Our Italian friends hinted he might be of Balkan origin.

Resistance 

A recurring theme on this hike was the difference between taking "the road" and taking "the trail." 

A few of our Italian companions generally favored the obvious and established route. Suggestions to deviate from the main trail, whether by taking trail 209 through the forest or making a detour to see the dam and lake, were initially met with skepticism. Once the alternative route revealed a hidden view, an interesting landscape feature, or some unexpected beauty, enthusiasm returned.  

Yet the next suggestion for a detour often triggered the same debate all over again. 

Perhaps this is one of those universal hiking truths: many hikers want certainty, while others are willing to trade certainty for curiosity. On this day, curiosity won some battles but not all of them.  

Rifugio Fratelli Longo 

The rifugio sits at 2,026 meters in the Valle del Monte Sasso and is one of the classic destinations in the Orobie Bergamasche. The rifugio is named after Giuseppe and Innocente Longo, two Bergamasque brothers who died while climbing the Matterhorn (Val d’Aosta) in 1934. 

The history of the rifugio is intertwined with that of nearby Rifugio Calvi. A mountain hut was originally constructed on this site by the CAI Bergamo section in 1923 was dedicated to the four Calvi brothers. Following damage and neglect during World War II, a larger rifugio was built nearby in the valley, becoming today's Rifugio Calvi. The older structure was renovated and rededicated to the Longo brothers, giving rise to the current Rifugio Fratelli Longo. 

Today, Longo serves hikers traversing the western Orobie and climbers heading toward passes that connect Val Brembana with Valtellina. Despite its remote location, it remains a welcoming place for a meal and conversation. During our visit, we chatted with the manager, who mentioned her son was preparing for a trip to Los Angeles, Death Valley, and Las Vegas. Small connections like that are one reason rifugi remain special places. 

Water, Dams, and Electricity 

The valley above Carona looks wild today, but much of its modern appearance was shaped by hydroelectric development during the twentieth century. 

Beginning in the early 1900s, the growing industrial centers of Bergamo and Milan needed electricity. The high valleys of the Orobie, with abundant snowfall (back then), steep gradients, and natural basins, were ideal for hydroelectric production. A series of dams, tunnels, reservoirs, and aqueducts were constructed throughout the area around Carona. 

Lago del Prato, Lago Marcio, Lago del Diavolo, Lago Fregabolgia, Lago del Sardegnana, and other reservoirs became part of an interconnected system designed to capture and move water efficiently through the mountains. Some of the trails hikers use today originated as service roads for dam construction and maintenance. The old aqueduct section we followed on trail 258 is a reminder that much of the valley's infrastructure was built not for recreation but for moving water. 

The dams dramatically altered the landscape while also preserving a visible record of twentieth-century engineering. Standing near Lago Diavolo, it is hard not to admire the ambition required to build large concrete structures in such a remote alpine environment long before modern construction equipment could be easily transported into the mountains. 

Today, hikers pass through a landscape where natural and human history coexist. Alpine lakes, shepherds, and centuries-old mountain traditions share the same valley with dams, tunnels, and hydroelectric infrastructure that helped power Lombardy's industrial growth. 

A Final Thought

We enjoyed this hike more than we expected. The combination of forests, reservoirs, alpine scenery, sheep, mountain history, and good food made for an excellent day in the Orobie. The route also reinforced a lesson we've learned many times: when given the choice between the road and the trail, the trail is usually the better story. 

  

  

  

  

  

Flora

[Apiaceae] Astrantia major

  

[Asteraceae] Centaurea sp.

  

[Asteraceae] Cirsium sp.

[Asteraceae] Pilosella sp.

[Onagraceae] Epilobium sp.

[Orchidaceae] Dactylorhiza maculata

[Orchidaceae] Gymnadenia rhellicani or Nigritella rhellicani

[Plantaginaceae] Digitalis grandiflora

[Rosaceae] Sanguisorba dodecandra

 
 

Studying for the Italian Driving Test

Thirty Questions ~ Cultural Cues ~ Reading Carefully ~ Study Partner ~ 

Culture ~ Exam Day ~ Idoneo ~ More Than Driving

If you think about how to prepare for the Italian written driving exam, you might think to start by simply reading the manual. That's a good idea, but only up to a point.

I read the manual. More than once.

Looking back, however, I don't think the primary value of reading it was memorizing every rule. The value was building a mental map. Later, after I inevitably missed a question on a practice exam, I usually had a vague idea where to return in the book to understand what I'd gotten wrong.

The real preparation came elsewhere.

Thirty Questions at a Time

The final and practice exams consist of thirty true-or-false questions. Three mistakes or fewer and you pass. Four mistakes and you don't.

By the time I sat for the real exam, I had completed roughly 215 practice tests through the ACI (Automobile Club d’Italia) app. Toward the end, I was consistently finishing with one or two mistakes, just below the passing threshold.

At first, I wondered how many practice tests would be "enough." Fifty? One hundred?

After 150 tests, I began to suspect that the app was serving up different questions the more I used it. I can't prove this, but it certainly felt as though new questions continued to appear well after I thought I'd seen everything. Whether that was clever programming or simply a large question bank, the lesson is the same: don't stop practicing just because your average score starts looking good.

Practice tests don't simply measuring what you know. They expose you to what you don't know.

Note: I used the Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI) as the school to help me with paperwork and in theory to help me study, though I did all the studying on my own. ACI had in person and video lessons, so that was available. ACI was able to watch my process on the app and knew when I was ready.

Cultural Cues

I expected to spend months learning road signs, right-of-way rules, speed limits, and stopping distances. There is plenty of all that. More questions than I care to remember involved trailers, towing weights, and which license category allows you to pull what combination of vehicle.

There were also many questions about railway crossings and passing. If the frequency of exam questions reflects national concerns, Italy appears to spend a surprising amount of time thinking about trains and passing, il sorpasso. Drilling on trains makes sense because many roads cross tracks. But the passing questions exhaust you. It’s as if they are trying to cover every possible little 'pass' an Italian driver has tried.

Another thing that surprised me was how much space the Italian driving manual gives to what happens after an accident. Not just the mechanics of stopping, putting out the warning triangle, or avoiding further danger, but the duty to help. In Italy, this is not presented as a nice thing to do, or even only as a moral obligation. It is a legal obligation. Article 189 of the Codice della Strada says that a road user involved in an accident connected to their behavior must stop and provide the necessary assistance to anyone who may have suffered personal injury. Failure to stop after an accident involving injury can bring reclusione, the word that managed to stump me during the real exam, along with suspension of the driving license. 

This felt different from the way I remembered the subject being framed in the United States, where the emphasis, at least in my memory, was more on calling 911, not leaving the scene, and not making things worse unless you knew what you were doing. The U.S. is complicated because each state has its own rules. California, for example, does require a driver involved in an injury accident to stop, exchange information, and render “reasonable assistance” to injured people. But for ordinary bystanders, the California framing is less a general legal duty to intervene and more a Good Samaritan protection: if you voluntarily help in good faith and without compensation, you are generally protected from civil liability unless your conduct is grossly negligent or willful.

All of this about providing help as a bystander made me wonder if I'm up to the task.

Reading Every Word

Somewhere along my study path I realized I wasn't just learning traffic law. I was learning how to read Italian carefully.

I found that many of my mistakes weren't because I misunderstood the driving rule, rather the mistake happened because I skimmed. A single word could reverse the meaning of an entire sentence.

Words like sempre, soltanto, generalmente, può, or deve demanded attention. Miss one qualifier and suddenly a statement that looked perfectly reasonable became false. And watch out for the word “solo”!

Examples:

• Il giubbotto retroriflettente ad alta visibilità è utile solo quando si deve sostituire una ruota forata. [Falso]
• Il pannello integrativo raffigurato si trova solo se l'incidente è avvenuto in autostrada. [Falso]

Sometimes the challenge wasn't vocabulary but grammar. An adjective agreed with a noun I wasn't expecting. A pronoun referred to something earlier in the sentence.

A phrase like minor consumo, norme internazionali, or lungo quel tratto carried just enough nuance that reading quickly became dangerous.

Other times I encountered words I'd never seen before like dirigibilità and incolumità. These aren't exactly words that come up while ordering coffee.

Examples:

• Le frecce direzionali in figura sono a freccia combinata diritta-destra per corsie destinate a chi deve proseguire diritto o a destra. [Vero]
• Analysis: "le frecce" in general not specifically
• Nel caso in cui la sosta è espressamente vietata da una norma del codice della strada, l'osservanza di tale divieto è comunque condizionata dalla presenza di cartelli segnaletici. [Falso]
• Analysis: "condizionata" agrees with "osservanza" not "divieto"
• Tenere aperto il tettuccio scorrevole del veicolo comporta un minor consumo di carburante. [Falso]
• Analysis => "minor consumo" means "consuma meno", which is not true!
• Gli stivali ad uso motociclistico sono omologati secondo norme internazionali. [Vero]
• Analysis => "norme internazionali" doesn't mean rigid international agreements but standards.
• Attraversare un passaggio a livello senza rispettare tutte le norme previste, può mettere in pericolo l'incolumità di molte persone che viaggino su un treno in transito. [Vero]
• Analysis => "incolumità" just means "safety".
• Le sospensioni non collaborano alla dirigibilità del veicolo, perché questa è assicurata unicamente dagli organi di direzione. [Falso]
• Analysis => "dirigibilità" means "La dirigibilità è la capacità di un veicolo, di un aeromobile o di un'imbarcazione di essere guidato e manovrato con precisione, seguendo una rotta stabilita."
• Il bordo del marciapiede dipinto come in figura indica che non si può sostare lungo quel tratto. [Vero]
• Analysis => "lungo + noun", not “a lungo”

So, in a small way, preparing for the exam gradually retrained the way I read Italian. Instead of looking for the general idea, I learned to slow down and pay attention to every word.

A Study Partner

After finishing practice tests, I often turned to AI. Not to answer the questions for me, but to explain why I had gotten one wrong. 

Often the explanation wasn't about driving at all. It was about grammar, vocabulary, or understanding how Italian legal language is constructed. Sometimes I'd ask for the explanation in Italian. Sometimes I'd ask it to compare the Italian wording with English. Occasionally I'd ask it to invent similar examples until the rule finally clicked.

It became an unexpectedly useful tutor, especially for someone taking the exam in a second language.

It’s easy to take a snapshot of the screen after the practice test is over and feed it into AI to ask why what you were thinking was wrong (or right in some cases).

A Small Window into Italian Culture

One unexpected pleasure was discovering what the exam writers considered worth asking. Some questions seemed delightfully specific.

Apparently, it is important to know that throwing a lit cigarette butt from the window is particularly dangerous if two-wheeled vehicles are approaching. (I wondered, what if the cigarette butt was extinguished first? Or, it was just another car?)

Another question asked whether a motorcycle rider may weave between stopped vehicles at a traffic light. It isn’t, but you see it all the time.

One question wanted to know whether two mopeds may ride side-by-side outside urban areas. Again, no, but hey, it saves space on the street, right?

And one memorable question suggested that elderly pedestrians should be encouraged across the road by flashing headlights and honking the horn. Thankfully, that statement was false.

Examples:

• Gettare mozziconi di sigaretta accesi dai finestrini è molto pericoloso soprattutto se sopraggiungono veicoli a due ruote. [Vero]
• Il conducente di un motociclo può fare lo slalom tra i veicoli al semaforo. [Falso]
• Fuori dai centri abitati, su una stessa corsia possono circolare affiancati due ciclomotori. [Falso]
• Quando le persone anziane attraversano la carreggiata bisogna lampeggiare e suonare il clacson per farle attraversare rapidamente. [Falso]

The questions occasionally felt like tiny snapshots of everyday Italian life. Whether they reflected reality or simply the collective imagination of the Ministry of Transport, they made studying more entertaining than I expected.

Reading the manual also helped explain some things I'd already noticed living in Italy. One entire section dealt with noise — when to use the horn, when not to, and why unnecessary noise matters. We wrote about this extensively in the Noise, According to the Italian Driving Manual.

Exam Day

The actual exam was almost anticlimactic. About halfway through the 20-minute exam, I encountered a word I couldn’t remember the meaning of: reclusione. I had in my head other license-related terms like revoca, revisione, ritirata, and sospensione, but not reclusione.

The meaning of the word finally came to me (“imprisonment”) and then it was a matter of trying to determine if the activity of the question – betting on illegal street races – could lead to imprisonment. For a moment I forgot I was taking a driving test and wondered whether I'd accidentally wandered into a law school exam. I guessed wrong, and that was one of the two questions I got wrong on the test.

Fortunately, one unfamiliar word and subject area (betting/racing) didn't derail the rest of the questions or the results.

On the day of the test I went for the test at the motorizzazione (DMV), I was in a group of about 25-30 young people.  I was one of the last to finish. In the room adjacent to the testing room, the results appeared within a few minutes after everyone was finished. The results were on a single sheet of paper thrown on a desk. Everyone flocked around the sheet of paper, squinting at the very small text to find their name and see if they passed.

Students gathering around to see results after the exam. 

Idoneo

Passed. That’s what idoneo means in this context: suitable, adequate. That's what you'll see next to your name right after the exam.

A little later I received a copy of my completed exam showing exactly which two questions I had missed. It was oddly satisfying after months of preparation to finally see the scorecard.

More Than a Driving Test

Preparing for the Italian written exam taught me the rules of the road. It also taught me something about learning a language.

The manual gave me a map. Hundreds of practice tests taught me where the difficult terrain was. Careful reading became more important than quick reading. AI helped explain the places where grammar and vocabulary got in the way.

And somewhere between trailer weights, railway crossings, and questions about cigarette butts, I became a more careful reader of Italian.