Mare | Montagna | Mare | Montagna - 4 Days in Abruzzo

Logistics ~ Vasto: the hinge ~ Day 1: Mare ~ Day 2: Montagna ~ Day 3: Museo e mare ~ 

Day 4: Montagna (Molise) ~ Conclusion: Mare + Montagna ~ General Photos ~ Food Photos

  

  
Top left: Trabocco Cungarelle - Vasto.
Top center: View from Vasto (CH), Abruzzo.
Top right: View from Agnone, Molise - looking west.

Bottom left: Spiaggia di Punta Aderci, Abruzzo.
Bottom center: Trabocco di Punta Aderci.

Bottom right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro - Vasto, Abruzzo.

We took a road trip to Abruzzo recently, choosing Vasto as a base for exploring the Costa dei Trabocchi. The plan, to the extent we had one, was mostly about the sea: trabocchi, swimming, some walking along the coast, a few towns, good lunches.

Four days later, the trip had settled into a rhythm we hadn't planned:

Mare → VASTO ← Montagna
Mare → VASTO ← Montagna

Vasto became the hinge. One day we headed down toward the Adriatic. The next day we turned our backs on it and drove toward the Majella and the hill towns inland. Then back to the sea, then back to the mountains.

Anything roughly an hour from Vasto, sometimes a little more, was under consideration. That gave us a large piece of southern Abruzzo and, eventually, a bit of neighboring Molise.

A lot of the trip was based on feeling rather than a checklist. We didn't arrive with a need to see the highest peak or complete a famous trail. But almost from the start, the mountains rising behind the coast exerted a stronger pull than we expected. They were just there, always visible or implied, turning what we thought would be a coastal trip into something else.

Logistics

We drove from Bergamo, about 675 kilometers each way. We passed through five Italian regions: Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Le Marche, and Abruzzo.  For comparison, it's like driving from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina and passing through six states and that is about the length of the trip one way. 

The route was A4 east toward Verona, A22 south toward Modena, a short piece of the A1, and then the A14 down the Adriatic side of Italy. The Italian autostrada numbers are straightforward enough until European road numbers start appearing on signs as well. The A4 around Verona is also part of the E70; the A22 is part of the E45; and farther south the A14 becomes part of the E55. These European routes overlay the Italian road system, which can make a route look as if it is changing names when the asphalt underneath you has not changed at all.

• European Route E70 includes Autostrada A4 (Serennissima)
• European Route E45 includes Autostrada A22 (Brenner motorway)
• European Route E55 includes Autostrada 14 (Adriatic motorway)

Our tolls came to about €52 one way.

This was a long drive, six to seven hours without getting too ambitious about stopping. We did stop at the Bauli Autogrill near Verona, which gets a mention here mainly because it has extremely clean bathrooms. 

Later we got off the autostrada for lunch and a walk around Santarcangelo di Romagna before continuing south. (On the way back, our midpoint stop was Forlì.)

We had considered flying and taking the train. Both were perfectly possible. But because we don't own a car, a long drive is still something of a novelty for us. There is something pleasant about watching the geography change and talking while it does.

Vasto: the hinge

We pulled into Vasto at around 7 p.m. on a Sunday and found the historic center hopping. In fact, it may have been the most action we saw during our five nights there.

We stayed at BluOnlyHotel on Via Adriatica, a pedestrian street running along the eastern edge of the old town. Calling it a street almost undersells the location. It functions as a long balcony above the slope, with the Adriatic out in front of you and Vasto's historic center immediately behind.

One of the first things you notice walking along Via Adriatica is something that isn't there, the church of San Pietro.

The Resti della Chiesa di San Pietro consist largely of the surviving Romanesque portal and wall of a church that once stood among a whole row of buildings here. In 1956, a major landslide struck this side of Vasto. San Pietro was badly damaged, and the church was eventually demolished in 1959, leaving its façade as a kind of open-air memory of what had occupied the space before. The landslide began on February 22, 1956 and permanently altered this edge of the historic city.

Below Via Adriatica is the Parco Muro delle Lame, today partly occupied by sports facilities and paths dropping toward the sea. We initially wondered about the word lame. It isn't referring to blades. In parts of the central Apennines, lama was historically used for certain kinds of slope movement or landslide, which is appropriate here.

Standing on Via Adriatica that first evening, looking east, we felt we had chosen exactly the right place for exploring the coast.

What we didn't know yet was that we were, in a sense, facing the wrong way. Half of the trip would happen over our shoulders.

Day 1: Mare

The first day was dedicated to the thing that had ostensibly brought us here: the Costa dei Trabocchi.

A trabocco is a wooden fishing structure built out over the sea and connected to land by a narrow walkway. Long arms extend from the platform and support a large net that can be lowered into the water and then raised when fish pass over it. The important point is that the fisherman can work from the structure without going out to sea in a boat.

There are many stories about the origin of the trabocchi and even about the origin of the word itself, so it is better not to be too definite about either. What is clear is their practical purpose. They offered coastal families a way to fish while avoiding some of the risks of taking a small boat onto the Adriatic. Over time they became one of the defining images of this part of Abruzzo, and today some have been converted into restaurants.

From Vasto we walked downhill through the Muro delle Lame area until we reached the former railway corridor, now part of the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi, the long cycling and walking route that follows the coast.

This was our first proper encounter with the coastline at walking speed. All told, from Vasto down to the Via Verde, north for a while and then back again, we covered only about seven kilometers. Bikes would have taken us much farther, but we were content to explore slowly.

And there was plenty to distract us.

Besides the trabocchi, along the shore there were enormous blocks filled with rounded pebbles that looked vaguely like deteriorating concrete. They weren't. They were natural conglomerate that had broken away from the geology above and landed on the beach looking suspiciously man-made.

Then there were the tall stands of cane growing beside the path. We started wondering about Arundo plinii and Arundo donax, particularly the latter, the giant cane we associate with coastlines, disturbed ground and marshy places. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

Interspersed among the cane grass were a few squirting cucumber - Ecballium elaterium.   

And offshore were three structures we kept staring at. They turned out to be the Rospo Mare oil platforms, about eighteen kilometers east of Vasto and barely visible, along with the Alba Marina, the floating vessel used to store production from the field.

Conglomerate, cane grass, and oil platforms are the kind of things that can occupy us for quite a while.

For lunch we went to Trabocco Cungarelle, getting the full experience of walking along a narrow wooden passage to eat above the water on one of the structures we had spent the morning trying to understand from the land. The structure has some give, and even on a relatively calm day you can feel the structure sway slightly during our lunch.

Later we drove north to explore Punta Aderci, the large coastal reserve north of Vasto. It was odd to see rolling, manicured fields reaching down to the ocean. On the beaches, there were informal driftwood shelters that looked like teepees.

We didn’t swim at Punta Aderci, but headed back south toward Vasto and swam at Spiaggia di San Nicola, but it wasn't one of those swims that causes you to emerge from the water announcing that you have just discovered the Mediterranean for the first time. It was passable. Oddly, that informed our next day's journey.  

By the end of the day, the coast hadn't exhausted our curiosity. Instead, it made us start wondering more about what lay behind it. And it was decided: that the next morning we would drive inland.

Day 2: Montagna

Our first stop on day 2 was Guardiagrele, at the foot of the Maiella. We had put it on the day's itinerary as a pleasant-looking town on the way toward the mountains. Instead, we ended up staying much longer than expected.

Guardiagrele has a long tradition of artisan work, particularly metalworking: wrought iron, copper and goldsmithing. It is associated with the medieval goldsmith Nicola da Guardiagrele, and those traditions are still part of the identity the town presents today.

We learned more about that not in a museum but through conversations we had during our day there.

We spoke for a long time with the widow of one of the town's last traditional copper workers. Then there was another long conversation connected with Pasticceria Palmerio and one of Guardiagrele's more famous contributions to Italian pastry.

This is one of the pleasures of travel that is impossible to schedule. You can schedule the duomo for 10:30, but you can't schedule talking with somebody for an hour because one question leads to another.

Somewhere along the way we also learned about Modesto Della Porta, born in Guardiagrele in 1885. He was a tailor by profession and a poet by inclination, writing in Abruzzese dialect about ordinary village life with humor, satire and a fair amount of melancholy. His 1933 collection Ta-pù, lu trumbone d'accumpagnamente: poesie in dialetto abruzzese (often formatted in standard Italian as Ta-pù, il trombone d'accompagnamento: poesie in dialetto abruzzese) made him an enduring local figure. The Italian word for trumpet is tromba, the title specifically uses trumbone (trombone) to emphasize a deeper, background instrument rather than the leading melody of a trumpet. The ta-pù referring to the bass notes or rhythmic thumping sound of a brass instrument playing an accompaniment part (like an "oom-pah" sound in a town band).

We like local heroes of this sort. The national canon of Garibaldi, Alighieri, and Gramsci have plenty of room elsewhere. When you arrive in a town and discover that one of the people it still celebrates was a tailor who wrote dialect poetry, you immediately know a little more about the place.

Lunch was at L’Osteria Romantino, a casual and satisfying affair. The day’s events conspired to have us have our dessert before lunch at Palmerio. Oh well.

The Guardiagrele specialty we had at Palmerio is called le sise delle monache, literally "nuns' breasts." They are soft sponge cakes filled with pastry cream and covered in powdered sugar, traditionally formed into three rounded peaks. There are competing stories about both their invention and the name, as there should be with any pastry called nuns' breasts. What isn't disputed is their close association with Guardiagrele and with the Palmerio pastry tradition.

We then continued toward Pennapiedimonte. Or tried to.

For about half an hour we found ourselves stopped because the Giro d'Abruzzo was passing through the area. The 2026 race was being held September 15–18, and we had managed to intersect it on our mountain day.

There isn't much to do when a bicycle race has appropriated your road. You wait. You wait for the waves of support cars, police, and more support cars, wondering if the riders will ever pass. Then the helicopter signals their arrival. Everything passes and the quiet of the countryside returns.

Eventually we reached Pennapiedimonte with a very modest plan: park, walk to the Belvedere Balzolo, admire the view, and perhaps poke around a little.

The word balzo can describe a ledge, shelf or steep place on a mountainside, which is a good description of what happens here: the land suddenly opens into the deep valley of the Avello below you.

We were not planning a serious walk. We walked anyway.

One path led to another, and the terrain kept drawing us farther into the valley toward the Cascata del Macarone della Pila. By the time we returned to Pennapiedimonte, our quick look from the belvedere had turned into roughly 13 kilometers of hiking.

Beautiful and unexpected. Those might be the two words that best describe the day and, increasingly, the trip.

We had driven inland because the mountains looked interesting from Vasto. Instead, we got metalworking, dialect poetry, nuns' breasts, a bicycle race and a 13-kilometer walk we hadn't planned to take.

The sea was beginning to have competition.

Day 3: Museo e mare

After the previous day's unexpected hiking, we returned to the coast, although not immediately. We spent the morning in Vasto itself, including the Musei Civici di Palazzo d'Avalos.

Palazzo d'Avalos sits right at the edge of the old city facing the Adriatic. Its civic museums cover a surprising amount of ground: archaeology, paintings by the Palizzi family and others, contemporary art, historic costume, and the Neapolitan garden overlooking the sea. There was also a temporary exhibition, Mitografie Postmoderne, that pulled us rather unexpectedly into Italian painting from the 1980s to the present. The exhibit presented curated selection of works from major figures associated with Anachronism, pittura colta, and visionary realism spanning from the 1980s to today.

We have a weakness for civic museums. The best ones don't necessarily contain universally famous objects. Instead, they explain something about the place outside the museum doors.

Here the archaeology takes you backward beneath modern Vasto to Roman Histonium and earlier settlements, while the art collections pull you forward again into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a relatively small space, the town gets taken apart and put back together.

Nearby we went into Santa Maria Maggiore, where our attention was promptly diverted by an elegantly dressed skeleton. Why not?

Beneath the main altar is the body of San Cesario Martire, displayed in a glass case and dressed as a soldier-martyr. The church's own history says the relics were given to Cesare Michelangelo d'Avalos in 1695 and subsequently kept at Santa Maria Maggiore. The presentation belongs to the tradition of the corpi santi, relics from Roman catacombs that were dressed and displayed as early Christian martyrs. The visual certainty of the uniform is greater than what can actually be known about the biography of the person whose bones are inside it.

We went into the church expecting architecture and came out thinking about what happens to a person's identity several centuries after death. May our skeletons end up elegantly dressed in some church.

For lunch we went to Da Ferri, an Osterie d'Italia recommendation, and were not disappointed. We ordered one of the local specialties, brodetto alla vastese, or lu vrudatte in dialect. This is fish is cooked in an earthenware pot and, importantly, isn't stirred with utensils while cooking. You eat the fish first. Then, when what remains in the pot is mostly its intensely flavored tomato-and-seafood broth, the waiter arrives with spaghetti and drops it in. A lunch with a second act. We like.

Afterward this satisfying lunch, we continued north toward Fossacesia and the Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.

The abbey occupies a spectacular promontory above the Adriatic. There was an early monastic presence here, with the abbey developing around the turn of the first millennium and becoming an important Benedictine center. The name in Venere is traditionally connected with a Roman sanctuary dedicated to Venus that once occupied the site, although no architectural remains of that temple survive.

The setting does much of the work. You have the Romanesque church, monastery and cloister, but beyond them the land simply drops away toward fields and the Adriatic. We stopped and enjoyed the breezes under the pines with two shakertos in front of us.

It was another reminder that our coast and mountain categories weren't really separate. From the abbey you see both at once.

We ended the afternoon back at sea level, swimming at Spiaggia di Torricella. This swim was better. The beach was nearly empty, the water clearer than what we had found on our first coastal day, and we could swim around and look down at fish in the water. We were happy.

Day 4: Montagna (Molise)

With one full day left, there was no debate about the direction. Inland it was.

By now the pattern had established itself. Our first mountain day had not been an aberration. Given another free day, we again preferred to turn away from the sea.

This time we also broke the geographic premise of the post by leaving Abruzzo altogether and drove to Agnone, in Molise.

Agnone is famous for bells, specifically the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli. The Marinelli foundry is described as the oldest bell foundry in Italy and one of the oldest in the world, with a bell-making tradition stretching back many centuries.

The word Pontificia is not just an advertising flourish. In 1924, Pope Pius XI granted the foundry the privilege of using the papal coat of arms. The museum and foundry visit is a good example of a subject that sounds specialized until someone explains it properly.

A traditional bell mold is built in layers. There is the inner core, the anima; then the falsa campana, a temporary full-size model of the future bell; then the outer mantello. Decorations and inscriptions are formed in wax. Eventually the false bell is destroyed, leaving the space into which the molten bronze is poured.

So you build a bell in order to destroy it so that you can make the bell. Got it? We approve of processes with this level of complication.

The tour also wandered into the larger history of bells, including the enormous Tsar Bell in Moscow, cast in the eighteenth century at more than 200 tonnes. It never rang. A fire and subsequent thermal shock caused a huge section to break away before the bell could ever be used.

Afterward we had lunch at Locanda Mammì, just outside Agnone. Chef Stefania Di Pasquo's restaurant has a Michelin star, but what we remember most was how naturally it seemed to belong where it was. We were sitting among the rolling hills and farms of Molise eating an eight-course menu built around ingredients from the same landscape.

The food was elegant without feeling precious, the portions generous enough that an eight-course lunch remained recognizably lunch.

So the day produced two discoveries: how bells are made, and that perhaps we had been underestimating Molise. 

And then we drove back to Vasto. Again.

On the drive back, we thought of a man we met in Agnone. Wandering a backstreet to go see La Porta Storta, we met an old man, Constantino. For fifteen minutes he told us about the street we were standing on, in front of his house. The sculpture above the lintels and then invited us into his foyer to see a tribute to the Madonna and clearly proud to show off his house. He was slightly disappointed we didn't accept his offer to come up for coffee. Only fifteen minutes but such a strong image remained in our heads.  And they say Il Molise non esiste (Molise doesn't exist). We think it very much is alive. (Abruzzi e Molise). It only became its own distinct, autonomous region in 1963, making it one of the youngest regional entities in the country.)

Conclusion: Mare + Montagna

Each evening we returned to the same town, parked and walked Via Adriatica to our hotel. From Via Adriatica, the Adriatic was still in front of us. Below were the Muro delle Lame, the former railway line and the coast we had originally come to see.

Behind us were Guardiagrele, Pennapiedimonte, the Majella and, farther away, Agnone.

That was the surprise of the trip.

We hadn't discovered that the sea was disappointing or that the mountains were somehow "better." It was the proximity of the two that made the area interesting. A morning could begin in a town hanging above the Adriatic and end with us walking farther than intended into a mountain valley. The next day we could reverse direction and swim.

Vasto worked because it sat between those possibilities. We had chosen it as a base for the Costa dei Trabocchi. By the end, what we liked most was the hinge.

Mare → VASTO ← Montagna.

Then turn around and do it again.

General Photos

   

Left: Arundo donax at Spiaggia di San Nicola, Vasto.
Center left: Arundo donax along the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.

Right left: Arundo plinii at Punta Aderci.
Right: Squirting cucumber (Ecballium elaterium).

    
   

Left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto - San Cesario Martire

Center left: Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore - Vasto
Center right and Right: Co-Cathedral of Saint Joseph - Vasto

  
Left: Natural conglomerate on the coast near Vasto.
Center: View from Spiaggia Toricella.
Right: Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi.

  
Left: Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Center: View from Abbazia di San Giovanni in Venere.
Right: View from Agnone (Isernia), Molise.

  

Left: View from Vasto - night - looking toward Termoli.

Center: View from Vasto - day - looking toward Termoli.

Right: Resti della chiesa di San Pietro in Vasto.

  

Left: Trabocco Cungarelle from the coast.
Center: View from Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: One Rospo Mare platform and storage vessel 18 km from the coast.

 

Trabocco Cungarelle.

  
Left: Guardiagrele - Bust of Modesto Della Porta.

Center: Guardiagrele - Monumento Modesto Della Porta.

Right: Guardiagrele - Panorama dal Giardino della Villa Comunale.

   

Left: Tracks for hike from Pennapedimonte into Valle dell'Avello.

Center left: Walk from Vasto to explore Via Verde dei Trabocchi.
Center right: Palazzo d'Avalos - Giardino Napoletano - Vasto, Abruzzo.
Right: Palazzo D'Avalos - Mitografie Postmoderne Exhibit.

Food Photos

  

da Ferri (Vasto) dishes including appetizer and brodetto alla vastese.

  
Locanda Mammì - amuse-bouche and starter with trout.

  

Locanda Mammì - deer with peanut and plum sauce, risotto with nettle, and peanut dessert item.

  

Left and center: Dishes at Trabocco Cungarelle.
Right: Le sise delle monache at Pasticceria Palmerio in Guardiagrele, Abruzzo.

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.

Noise, According to the Italian Driving Manual

Noise On ~ Book Noise ~ Clacson Dialects ~ Clacson Meets Lden ~ 

European Driver, Quiet in Theory ~ California Dreaming Horn ~ 

Exhaust as a Personal Statement ~  Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls ~ 

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

A variation of the image used in the SID Manuale, in the chapter on noise

Noise On

I've always had an interest in noise, and an issue with noise. I'm interested in noise's impact on people, why some people don't seem bothered by it, and why I am, and why is there is so much of it—NOISE—in the world. Past posts include: Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage, A Field Guide to Italian Hotel Noises, and You Know It When You Hear It.)

So, it was with surprise and delight that I found a chapter in the Italian driving-license book on noise. In the SIDA Manuale della patente A e B (the Italian study book), noise is not treated as a vague annoyance, the thing you complain about while closing the window. It is classified properly, soberly, and a little optimistically as inquinamento acustico: acoustic pollution. Be still my beating heart!

This treatment of noise immediately elevates it. Now my crazy rantings on noise have backing. The truck with the loose load passing below the apartment at 6 am is no longer merely “that truck again.” It is part of Chapter 22.

The book places noise beside air pollution, fuel consumption, exhaust fumes, vehicle maintenance, and the broader civic duty of not degrading our shared environment. It is a high-minded little chapter and I like that. It imagines the driver as a careful, rational, socially aware person who maintains the vehicle, limits unnecessary acceleration, avoids useless honking, and remembers that the road is shared.

Book Noise

The Italian driving manual does not treat noise as a mere irritation. It calls it what it is: inquinamento acustico, acoustic pollution. Section 22.1.5 begins plainly and lists a few behaviors you see commonly when driving around Italy.

Here's the section of the book:

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Il rumore prodotto dai veicoli a motore è causa di inquinamento acustico e di una serie di problemi di salute. I rimorchi vuoti, che sobbalzano eccessivamente, possono essere causa di rumore. Per questo motivo, ogni conducente ha il dovere di osservare le seguenti cautele:

• far verificare che la marmitta (dispositivo silenziatore) funzioni bene e sia di tipo approvato, sostituire la marmitta rovinata con una approvata per il veicolo, senza manometterla o modificarla
• evitare inutili e ripetute accelerazioni a vuoto, da fermi
• far controllare i freni se stridono (sostituendoli se necessario) e cercare di non frenare bruscamente
• non precorrere le curve ad alta velocità e no provocare lo strisciamento degli pneumatici
• sistemare il carico ed eventuali coperture in modo idoneo
• curare la manutenzione della carrozzeria e delle sospensioni
• chiudere delicatamente la portiera (anche per non danneggiare l'autovettura)
• per avvisare in caso di emergenza, usare il lampeggio al posto del clacson

Bisogna usare il clacson con la massima moderazione e nei centri abitati solo in caso di effettivo e immediato pericolo. Quando è necessario, suonare il clacson il più brevemente possibile.

Causano inquinamento acustico:

• marmitta non omologata
• uso improprio del clacson
• brusche partenze
• brusche frenate
• freni che stridono
• brusche frenate in curva
• carico svolazzante

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Some useful translations:

• inquinamento = pollution
• rimorchi = trailers
• sobbalzare = jump around
• marmitta = muffler
• clacson = horn
• freni = brakes
• carrozzeria = car body
• carico = load
• svolazzante = fluttering about

What I like about this list of causes of noise is how ordinary it is. The enemy is not only the roaring engine or the modified scooter exhaust. It is also the rattling trailer, the squealing brakes, the door slammed too hard, the horn used as punctuation, the fluttering tarp behind a truck. Noise is treated as a hundred small failures of attention. I guess you could say the entropy of noise in that everyone sort of says "Not my problem, I'm just driving down the road". This is similar to what we observed in the post Notes on Entropy from a Courtyard in Italy, which concluded that the concept of everyday entropy is the slow unraveling of order in one's surroundings because many say "not my job".

The manual is not saying: never make noise. Rather it says: do not make pointless noise. It is a tiny civic ethic disguised as test prep. Of course, I ace all the test questions in this section! They seem so obvious to me.

This careful driver exists. Somewhere maybe? Or, possibly only in the illustrations in the book.

Joking aside, studying for the Italian patente has changed how I hear the street. Before, vehicle noise fell mostly into emotional categories: irritating, very irritating, and mostly “is that thing legally allowed to exist?” Now I have a point of reference, a chapter in the official driver's manual. The bad muffler, the squealing brakes, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back of a truck: these are not just sounds. They are categories of noncompliance and sections that at least I can console myself with and point to even if it doesn't really help.

Clacson Dialects

The word clacson looks odd to English eyes. It is the Italianized form of Klaxon, originally a trademarked name for an electric warning horn. Treccani defines clacson as a graphic variant of English klaxon, now used in everyday Italian for the acoustic warning device in a vehicle. In official language you may also see avvisatore acustico, which is more literal: acoustic warning device. But clacson is the word more commonly used. The word sounds noisy.

The manual says the clacson should be used with la massima moderazione, and in towns only in cases of immediate and real danger. Good advice in theory, but in practice it's another story. (Also, "maximum moderation" sounds less like driving advice and more like a rule for surviving modern life.)

Moderate your horn, your speed, your acceleration, your impatience, and we'd add perhaps also your expectation that anyone else has read the same page. Why? Because, in practice, the horn has many unofficial meanings in Italy. It can mean:

“I am here.”
“You are slow.”
“The light turned green 0.4 seconds ago, step on it!”
“I know you, hi!”
“I am entering this blind corner faster than I should and please be aware.”
“I am annoyed, and everyone within hearing range should be informed.”

So yes, officially, the horn is a safety device. Practically, the horn is a language. It has grammar, dialect, local idioms, and emotional range. It may be brief, extended, musical, accusatory, celebratory, or existential.

Clacson Meets Lden

While the Italian driving manual treats noise with admirable seriousness, as inquinamento acustico or acoustic pollution, there are no hard limits. The guidance seems squishy, basically "try not to make noise".

The European vocabulary around noise is more precise: Lden, Lnight, dB(A), exposure thresholds.

• Lden is the average noise over the whole day, evening, and night, with evening and night weighted more heavily because noise then is more disruptive.
• Lnight is the average night-time noise, especially relevant for sleep.
• dB(A) means decibels adjusted to approximate human hearing.

The European Union’s Environmental Noise Directive is not exactly a “keep everyone below this number”, but more a framework for measuring, mapping, reporting, and managing environmental noise. The commonly used reporting thresholds are around 55 dB Lden for day-evening-night exposure and 50 dB Lnight for night exposure. (Official legal text.)

WHO Europe is more direct in its health-based recommendations. Its 2018 environmental noise guidelines recommend keeping road-traffic noise below 53 dB Lden and below 45 dB Lnight. Earlier WHO night-noise guidance gives 40 dB Lnight outside bedrooms as a target to protect the public, especially vulnerable groups. (Guidelines table.)

This is all somewhat useful to know, though perhaps less useful at the exact moment a 50cc (cubic centimeters) moto is ripping down Via Pignolo making the left turn onto Via San Tomaso. (Ironically, a 50cc moto can make upward of 80 dB(A) of noise.)

So figuring out whether Italy has “done something” under the Environmental Noise Directive turns out to be its own small research project. The EU directive requires maps and action plans, but the results do not live in one tidy place. Some are reported to the EEA (European Environment Agency), some appear through ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambiente) indicators, and many live with regions, cities, airports, railways, and road operators. Italy has implemented the directive through D.Lgs. 194/2005 and has reported population exposure using Lden and Lnight. So yes, the maps and plans exist. Whether the street below your window has become quieter is, as usual, a different and more personal question. Maybe in a future post, we'll dig into these reports but for now, we'll have to accept that it's being thought about, seems to be measured, and maybe work is in progress to mitigate exposure. (Glancing quickly at the reports shows road noise as by far the largest contributor to noise exposure.)

In daily life terms, 50 to 55 dB(A) is not the apocalypse. It is roughly equivalent to a quiet street, a refrigerator hum, moderate rainfall, or the lower edge of conversation. These numbers are not about one spectacular noise event, or whether your ears are immediately damaged. They are about cumulative exposure: the acoustic climate you live in hour after hour, night after night. A loud burst, say a 50cc moto, a truck, or a horn, may pass quickly and add energy to the average. But, more importantly, it interrupts the body. It makes you pause, tense, wake slightly, or lose the thread of what you were doing. Environmental noise is often the background soup: tires, scooters, brakes, engines, deliveries, a horn here, a horn there, all simmering below the level of catastrophe but above the level of peace.

So where are we with noise? The manual gives noise a better name: acoustic pollution. The EU and WHO go further and give it numbers for measuring, even if the averages wash it all out.

European Driver, Quiet in Theory

The Italian book’s treatment of noise is not unique. Germany has an explicit Umweltschutz category in its theory-test material, where unnecessary acceleration is not just wasteful but noisy. France folds le bruit et la pollution into the theme of using the vehicle with respect for the environment.

The vocabulary changes, but the fantasy is shared: the driver as a calm, technically competent, socially aware participant in public space.

Naturally, we started to wonder if Italians are better, about the same, or worse in terms of noise pollution. How would you even measure this?

It turns out that comparisons are not that easily had. A 2022 study in Environment International looked at road-traffic noise exposure across 724 European cities and 25 larger urban areas, using Lden starting at 55 dB. It found that almost 60 million adults were exposed to road-traffic noise levels considered harmful to health. But the study also noted a very practical problem: the underlying noise maps varied in method, format, and quality. So the question 'Are Italians noisier?' quickly becomes 'What did France measure, what did Germany measure, and did Italy count that street with the delivery scooters?' Still, the broad picture is clear enough: road-traffic noise is a Europe-wide problem, and in many cities a large share of adults live above the 55 dB Lden threshold. (ScienceDirect)

The health connection in the ScienceDirect article is not that a honking car directly causes heart disease, satisfying though that explanation might be. Rather, traffic noise disturbs sleep, raises annoyance, and keeps the body making tiny stress adjustments: heart rate, blood pressure, hormones, vascular strain. Over years, those small insults can become less small. In that sense, inquinamento acustico is not only a poetic phrase from the driving manual. It is a public-health phrase hiding in plain sight.

The Italian and more generally the European driver, at least on paper, are custodians of the shared atmosphere: air, fuel, fumes, tires, brakes, and sound. It is a great idea in the manuals, but as we have noted, its application is where it kind of falls apart.

This is not to say that manuals are useless. Quite the opposite. They reveal the ideal. They show the shape of the civic person we are all supposed to become once we close the book, pass the exam, and enter a traffic circle with six exits, two motorcycles, a delivery van, and someone behind us expressing an opinion about our driving through the horn.

California Dreaming

After thinking about Italian drivers in relation to European drivers, we started to wonder about the United States. But the United States is not one driving system. Requirements and handbooks vary by state, even if the broad ideas are often similar. So, for a concrete example, we looked at California: not the largest state by area, since that honor goes decisively to Alaska, but the most populous state in the country, with more than 39 million people. Here's the California Driver Handbook.

California, being California, does have a section on “Green Driving,” with advice on smooth acceleration, steady speeds, tire pressure, vehicle maintenance, extra weight, and zero-emission vehicles. The environment is there, but mostly through the American vocabulary of efficiency, emissions, and technology.

The horn appears elsewhere, under safety. Use it to avoid collisions or warn others of hazards. Do not honk because someone is slow, because someone made a mistake, or because you are angry. The handbook even reminds drivers that the horn sounds much louder outside the vehicle, which is both obvious and apparently necessary to say.

What's interesting and laudable is that the Italian manual gathers these behaviors under a wider moral weather system: consumption, exhaust, maintenance, noise. The poorly maintained muffler, the unnecessary acceleration, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back: all are small failures of shared space.

The California handbook says: be safe, be efficient, don’t be a jerk. Gratuitous musical reference: "All the leaves are brown. And the horns are quiet..." sort of thing.

The Italian book says: you are part of an acoustic environment. Please behave accordingly. Gratuitous musical reference: "Prisencolinensinainciusol" sort of thing.

Exhaust as Personal Statement

The Italian driver's license manual also warns against modifying the vehicle, especially the muffler. This is where the theory becomes disconnected from reality, because some vehicles seem to treat the muffler not as a device for reducing noise, but as an instrument of self-expression.

The manual, being a manual, does not say any of this. It simply says the muffler should be approved, functioning, and not tampered with. It does not dwell on some drivers' desire to be heard before being seen.

After going through hundreds of quiz questions, I'm surprised how many questions come down to "is it okay to modify your muffler?". These muffler questions along with the noise questions are easy for me. Too bad the exam wasn't all of these types of questions.

There is something real hiding inside of rules, and that is that noise is rarely only mechanical. It is social, be it a horn or muffler. Noise says: I am here, I am impatient, I am powerful, I am careless, I am festive, I am young, I am late, I am delivering something, I am above maintenance schedules. But who could write rules and create exam questions for these meanings?

We could not find a neat statistic for how many Italians actually modify their mufflers. Perhaps this is just as well, because the phenomenon is easier to hear than to count. What we can say is that the issue is real enough to be written into the Codice della Strada. Article 155 says that drivers must avoid troublesome noise caused by how they drive, how the load is arranged, or other acts connected with circulation. It also says the silencing device, when required, must be kept efficient and must not be altered. So, the manual is not just being fussy. It is turning a legal principle into quiz form: the muffler is not a lifestyle accessory, even if some drivers seem to disagree.

Of course, aftermarket exhaust replacement is not automatically illegal. If it is approved for that vehicle and used as approved, it may be fine. The trouble begins when the exhaust becomes less “replacement part” and more “announcement system.” Somewhere between homologation and self-expression, the manual raises its hand and says: no.

Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls

One of the strange pleasures of studying for the patente as an adult is that the material says more to you than to a teenager. You have years of observing driver behavior, and you are quicker to say, "wait a minute—that's not what I have observed!"

The book says:

• Not to accelerate unnecessarily. The, a car accelerates unnecessarily.
• The horn is for immediate danger. Someone honks because a pedestrian has the audacity to use a crosswalk.
• Avoid rattling loads. A truck passes with something loose and metallic performing percussion in the back. At 6am.

So the city becomes a listening exam, and I try not to turn it into a moral judgement on what I'm hearing. Studying the rules creates a new sensitivity where I hear the street not only as background and blatant violation, but as a series of tiny decisions being made long before we landed in Italy or set up shop on Via Pignolo.

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

The driver's manual describes a quieter, more considerate world. A world where drivers maintain their vehicles, use the horn only when needed, avoid pointless acceleration, secure their loads, and remember that other people also have ears.

We are not always living in that world.

But there is something charming about the attempt. The manual names the problem. It gives us the polite version of civic life. It says: here is how not to add unnecessary noise to the world.

And that may be enough for a chapter in a driving book. Not enough to silence a modified scooter. Not enough to stop the celebratory honk, the impatient honk, the “I am behind you and therefore must communicate” honk. But enough to make you hear them differently and maybe even appreciate them.

I'll take that as a start. That's lesson one.

Once noise gets labeled as inquinamento acustico, we need to consider it as part of the shared air, like exhaust, dust, heat, and all the other things we contribute without quite meaning to.

The road is not only visual. It is not only signs, lanes, lights, and right-of-way. It is also sound. A public space has a soundtrack, and every driver is adding something to it. This is lesson two.

The Italian manual asks, with charming optimism, that we add less. Con la massima moderazione, of course.