A Hike from Rifugio Ca’ San Marco to Lago di Pescegallo

Overview ~ Notes ~ Hike to Eat ~ Casa Cantoniera and Linea Cadorna ~ 

Cultural Literacy, Italian Style ~ Photos

  

  

Top left: View from Passo di Verrobbio looking north toward Valtellina and Switzerland
Top center: Lago di Pescegallo, Valgerola Italy.

Top right: Tracks from Rifugio Ca' San Marco to Lago di Pescegallo.

Bottom left: Small lake near Passo di Verobbio.

Bottom center: View south over Lago Valmora, near Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Bottom right: Heading toward Ca' San Marco.


Sometimes the best hikes are the ones that materialize the day before. A friend asked us on Saturday if we wanted to go hiking the next day with a group of friends. Of course we did.

Overview

Duration: 2 hours (walking time)
Elevation: 445 m
Length: 7.8 km
Location: Italy, Bergamo, Alta Valle Brembana

Notes

We got a late start on Sunday due to large group logistics but managed to arrive at Rifugio Ca’ San Marco at still the respectable morning hour of 10:30 am, where the morning coolness was still perceptible.

Our destination was Lago di Pescegallo and CAI Sentiero 161, which runs from the rifugio toward Lago di Pescegallo and eventually Passo di Salmurano. With the size of the group, the late start, and unspoken “let’s have ourselves a little Sunday walk but let’s not miss lunch” hanging in the air, we knew this was not going to be an epic hiking day.

From Rifugio Ca’ San Marco, at about 1,830 meters, we headed toward Passo di Verrobbio at 2,026 meters. Once over the pass, the trail enters Val di Bomino and Valtellina. The scenery improved considerably around the pass, where there are remnants of World War I trenches (Linea Cadorna).

Our original destination was Lago di Pescegallo, but lunch exerted a stronger gravitational pull. There wasn’t enough time to descend to the lake and climb back before our reservation, so we turned around above it. Our outing came to 7.8 km with about 445 meters of elevation gain. The lake will have to wait for another day.

Hike to Eat

Back at Rifugio Ca’ San Marco, we arrived just as everyone was ordering lunch. We were with a very hungry group, and we dawdled on the way back to the rifugio, our attention caught by a small snake and a family from Lazio. The snake was likely a biscia or grass snake.

We went appropriately Valtellinese with pizzoccheri della Valtellina and penne con ragù di lepre. We finished by sharing strüdel, and then someone passed around some very good young goat robiola bought from a vendor who set up shop in the rifugio’s parking lot.

The pizzoccheri were particularly appropriate because we had just walked over the ridge into Valtellina. And so was our wine: a Triacca Valtellina Superiore Inferno 2021, made with Nebbiolo. We were drinking wine from the valley we could see off to the north.

But the gastronomic story didn't end with lunch.

As mentioned, in the parking area outside Ca’ San Marco was a cheese and salumi vendor. This made our day. We left with Bitto, fresh cow's-milk robiola, grasso d’alpe, bresaola, rye bread, dried blueberries, and bisciola – the Valtellinese sweet bread with figs, walnuts, and raisins. The vendor told us that his Bitto came from the milk of cows grazing below the rifugio, probably from the same malga we had looked down on while hiking.

Bitto has a fascinating connection to these valleys. Its origins are traditionally traced back to the Celts who took refuge in Valtellina and, as skilled herders and cheesemakers, developed long-lasting cheeses as a way of preserving the nutritional value of milk. Today's Bitto is a full-fat, semi-hard cheese made from raw whole cow milk, with a small amount of goat milk optionally added. The complicated modern history of cheese also produced "Storico Ribelle," the name adopted by producers who wanted to preserve the older production traditions.

So, one afternoon we had quite the Valtellina lineup: pizzoccheri, Nebbiolo wine from Valtellina, bitto cheese, bresaola (cured meat), bisciola (sweet bread), and gorgeous scenery.

Casa Cantoniera and Linea Cadorna

Today Ca’ San Marco may just seem like another rifugio, but there is more to it.

Ca’ San Marco’s role must be placed inside the geopolitical logic of the Via Priula, a historic communication route and an alpine hiking route that connects Bergamo to Morbegno, passing through the San Marco Pass.

Ca’ San Marco was built in 1593 at the edge of the Venetian mainland territories, it functioned as a casa cantoniera (point of monitoring traffic, goods, and movement) on an international frontier: a staffed outpost at the very crest of the Passo San Marco, where the Republic of Venice met the territories of the Grigioni (Three Leagues). The formal customs house — the actual dogana — sat lower down at Mezzoldo, where goods and travelers were inspected before beginning the climb. Ca’ San Marco, by contrast, was the high‑altitude presence of Venetian authority: a shelter, a control point, and a symbolic marker of the border. In early‑modern Alpine practice, this was typical — customs in the last village, state outpost on the pass itself — and Ca’ San Marco fit that pattern precisely.

Today the pass separates two Lombard valleys: Val Brembana (Province of Bergamo) on the southern side and Valtellina (Province of Sondrio) on the northern side. Administratively it is no longer a state frontier, but geographically it remains a watershed divide between the Brembo and the Adda, and culturally it still marks the transition between two distinct alpine regions with different historical trajectories. Before the unification of Italy, however, this ridge was a true international boundary: Venice to the south, the Grigioni to the north, and beyond them the routes toward Chur, the Rhine, and northern Europe. The Via Priula was built precisely to exploit this crossing, allowing Venetian merchants to bypass Spanish‑controlled Milan and maintain direct access to transalpine trade.

The Orobie form a steep, folded, high‑relief chain that historically acted as a natural barrier: militarily defensible, commercially constraining, and climatically severe. Only a handful of routes could be made viable, and Passo San Marco was one of the few that could be kept open and controlled. Snow, fog, and avalanches made the crossing dangerous; Ca’ San Marco’s bell was used to guide travelers in storms. In this sense, the building’s function was inseparable from the landscape: the mountains created the obstacle, the pass created the opportunity, and Ca’ San Marco was the human instrument that made the frontier navigable and governable.

Nearby and many centuries later, we can see remains of World War I activity. At the Verrobbio pass, which we passed through to go to Lago di Pescegallo, the remains of the trenches built before the outbreak of the First World War by the Italian Army are still present. In anticipation of a possible breakthrough of the Tonale front and a consequent descent of the Austrians along the Valtellina, Italy build these defenses. They are part of the Cadorna Line. Fortunately, these defensive constructions were never used.

The official name of the Cadorna Line is the Northern Frontier. Cadorna comes from the surname of Luigi Cadorna (1850 – 1928), Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, who ordered them built. This defensive system is 70 km long, stretching from the Varese area to the Aprica pass in Val Camonica, and served as a second line of defense in case the main front, at Stelvio and Tonale, collapsed or in case of attack by the Austrians through neutral Switzerland. Fortunately, the Cadorna Line was never used.

Cultural Literacy, Italian Style

Our education continued in the car on the way home.

First came an important Bergamasco proverb: La bóca l’è mai straca se la sa mia de àca – roughly, the mouth is never tired if it hasn't tasted of cow, or, more practically, a meal isn't really finished until you've had some cheese.

Given the amount of cheese we'd just bought, we were apparently taking the proverb seriously.

Then somehow, we arrived at the seven deadly sins and a discussion of ignavia – sloth, indolence, or the unwillingness to take a stand.

And then came 15 minutes discussing the movie Amici miei ("My Friends" in English.)

According to our Italian friends, Amici miei, Mario Monicelli's 1975 comedy, is basically required reading – or viewing – for understanding Italian culture. The film follows a group of middle-aged Florentine men who escape everyday life through their zingarate: elaborate, spontaneous, and often ridiculous pranks. This is one of those films we've heard referenced enough that not knowing it starts to feel like a gap in our Italian cultural education.

It wasn't the longest hike we've done, and technically we didn't make it all the way down to Lago di Pescegallo. But we crossed from Bergamo into Valtellina, walked past old military trenches, ate pizzoccheri, drank Valtellina wine, bought cheese with roots stretching back to the Celts, and returned home with a lot more.

Not bad for a Sunday.

Photos

  

Rifugio Ca' San Marco in Alta Valle Brembana, Bergamo, Italy.

  

Left: Menu at Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Center: The lion of San Marco / Venice affixed on the side of Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

Right: A wine from the nearby Valtellina, a Nebbiolo.

  

Left: Rifugio Ca' San Marco - pizzoccheri - a typical food from the nearby Valtellina valley.

Center: Rifugio Ca' San Marco - penne con ragù di lepre.

Right: Rifugio Ca' San Marco strudel.

  

Left: Bitto cheese on polenta crust.

Center: Our cheese and meat haul.

Right: Local vendor's sign at the rifugio, selling cheeses and other products from the nearby valleys.

  

Left and center: Part of the Linea Cadorna at Passo di Verrobbio. 

Right: A cow grazes near Rifugio Ca' San Marco.

The Loops of August

Coding Loop ~ Vacation Loop ~ AI Loop ~ Duke Loop ~ Loops Within Loops

The Loops of August: Coding, AI, YouTube Algorithms, Vacations

August is strange in Italy. Shutters come down, regular routines disappear, people vanish, and then toward the end of the month everyone materializes again, tanned, rested or claiming to be, and faintly optimistic about September.

We mostly sat out this August. While other people were heading for beaches, islands, mountains, and increasingly complicated travel connections, we stayed home and worked on projects. There was coding to do. There were long conversations with AI assistants. And, for reasons that will become clear, there were an alarming number of dukes.

The disappearing and reappearing of Italy is the obvious one, an annual cycle so regular that you can practically set a calendar by the appearance of handwritten Chiuso per ferie signs. But once we started looking, other loops appeared around us: bursts of obsessive coding followed by months of silence; conversations with AI assistants that circle the same problem without quite landing on it; and a YouTube algorithm that has decided we have an inexhaustible appetite for overlooked stepdaughters marrying scarred members of the British aristocracy.

These are not really the same kind of loop. Some loops we create ourselves. Some loops society creates for us. Some loops we get stuck in. And some, apparently, come with a ducal seal.

The Coding Loop: Three Weeks On, Three Months Off

The evidence is sitting in our GitHub contribution charts.

We used to imagine that we worked on our Scrapbook project continuously, but slowly realized we actually didn’t, and the little green squares of the contribution chart tell that story. There will be three or four weeks of dense activity, commits stacked on commits, followed by long stretches of almost nothing. Green squares appear in a row showing activity. Then white, the digital equivalent of abandonment.

GitHub contributions going in cycles.

Scrapbook is not a toy app we occasionally tinker with. It is a long-running project built and maintained by the two of us, with roughly 80,000 lines of code, about 25,000 of them executable. It lives in the cloud, uses a range of technologies, gets fixed, acquires new features, and often just needs attention because something it depends on has changed. We have been working on it for years and, importantly, we don't want to finish it.

There is language for the pattern visible in our GitHub charts. Researchers studying human activity call one aspect of it burstiness: concentrated periods of activity separated by long periods of relative quiet. Our weeks inside those bursts can also feel a lot like hyperfocus, the state of becoming so absorbed in an activity that time and everything around it recedes.

And coding is particularly good at keeping a burst going. One fix suggests another. The new feature almost works. Then it works. Now that it works, we can finally clean up the thing beside it that has annoyed us for two years. While we are in the code, we notice something else. At some point it is midnight, and a perfectly reasonable Saturday has disappeared into a C# and JavaScript methods that should have taken twenty minutes.

Then, just as mysteriously, coding stops.

For months we might barely touch the code. Our Scrapbook project continues to run. Other interests take over. The green squares disappear.

A few years ago, we noticed this pattern and wondered whether it was something we should worry about. Now we are less sure. This is coding for pleasure. There is no product manager waiting for a sprint review, and no investor is asking about features. Perhaps the periods of inactivity are part of what makes the periods of intensity possible.

The coding loop may be one of the loops we don't need to escape. We just disappear from it for a while, until something pulls us back in again.

The August Loop: Everybody Leaves, Everybody Comes Back

Our little two-person coding cycle takes place inside a much larger and considerably more organized loop: August in Italy.

Starting in late July, the country begins its progressive emptying-out. Shop windows display hand scrawled Chiuso per ferie messages. Offices become harder to reach. Automated out of office messages in email start to become the norm. Conversations increasingly revolve around when you are leaving, where you are going, and when you are coming back. Then comes Ferragosto, August 15, the symbolic center of a summer vacation season treated with a seriousness we still find impressive after living here for years.

We have written about this before: Bergamo – Street Sign Language Lesson X – Ferragosto!, Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, and most recently Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness. In the last post, we were interested in the slightly paradoxical Italian search for escape: everybody getting away from it all at approximately the same time.

But escape is only half the loop.

Toward the end of August, people begin appearing again. The shutters go up. Familiar faces return, various shades darker. There are stories about beaches and mountains and islands, mixed with complaints about traffic, ferries, delayed flights, excessive heat, and all the other inconveniences encountered while getting away to relax.

Then comes that brief September feeling that everything is beginning again. Schools reopen. Offices refill. Out of office messages just become the normal delayed responses. Plans are made. People seem faintly renewed. For a few weeks, September has the same quality of January without New Year’s resolutions.

The return completes the loop. Unlike our coding bursts, this one is based on the calendar and is collective. Everyone knows roughly when it is going to happen and participates willingly.

There is something slightly funny about the annual acceptance of it all. Italy empties out in August, businesses close because everyone is away, people complain that nothing is open and nothing can get done because everyone is away, and then the whole system starts up again. Next summer, we will do it all over.  

The AI Loop: Down the Rabbit Hole

During the hotter days of August, we spent quite a bit of time indoors with air conditioning and AI assistants, sometimes while coding and sometimes asking about whatever question had wandered into our heads that day.

This introduced another kind of loop.

The transaction often starts innocently enough. Take a coding task. We ask an assistant to solve something. It misunderstands one small but important part of the problem. We correct it. The assistant apologizes, usually enthusiastically: "You’re absolutely right!" It then produces another answer based on substantially the same misunderstanding. We correct it again.

Twenty minutes later, we are no longer solving the original problem. We are trying to make the assistant understand the conversation we have already had. We see our AI credits are going to zero, and we bump our spending budgets because the problem needs to be solved.

Part of what keeps us stuck is sunk cost. We have already supplied the background, pasted the code, explained what we tried, and corrected assumptions. Surely one more prompt will do it. Meanwhile, the conversation itself is getting longer, accumulating failed approaches and explanations that may now be part of the problem. We find ourselves not so politely telling the assistant that we are burning our credits while going around in circles. Response: empathetic with yet another attempt at a fix.

The problem is that AI answers are often very plausible. A wrong answer doesn't necessarily (immediately) look wrong. It can arrive neatly formatted, confidently explained, perhaps with five helpful headings. This makes it surprisingly easy to follow an assistant a considerable distance down the wrong road before realizing that neither of you remembers where you intended to go.

We used to jokingly call some of this being "gaslit by AI," but that isn't really what is happening. The assistant isn't trying to convince us of an alternate reality. More often, we and it have diverged on what problem is being solved. It thinks we asked one thing; we thought we asked another. Sometimes the fault is ours because we were imprecise, withheld context we didn't realize mattered, or assumed the assistant understood something that existed only in our heads.

We are slowly getting better at recognizing the warning signs.

Sometimes the answer is to narrow the question. Sometimes it is to start a fresh conversation rather than keep dragging the accumulated baggage forward. And sometimes the best solution is simply to leave one AI assistant and ask another.

That last technique has become surprisingly useful. Instead of asking the second assistant to solve the whole problem again, we can show it what happened and ask questions: Were we talking past each other? What is the first assistant misunderstanding? Here’s a plan to fix a coding issue the first assistant gave us. What do you think of it?

We have, in other words, begun taking one AI assistant aside to complain about another AI assistant. It sounds faintly absurd translated into ordinary life, but it works. Different assistants approach the same question differently, notice different assumptions, and get stuck in different places. Increasingly, knowing how to use AI assistants means knowing not only what to ask, but when to stop asking the same one.

The AI loop is therefore unlike our coding loop. Coding can pull us forward because every solved problem exposes another interesting one. The AI loop at times can keep us in place because every attempted solution seems as though it might finally resolve the previous attempted solution but doesn’t.

The trick is noticing when supposed progress has turned into circling.

The Duke Loop: Algorithmic Pulp Fiction

Meanwhile, YouTube has discovered that apparently what I need in August is an overlooked stepdaughter, a cruel stepmother, letters sealed with wax, a mysterious duke with a scar who perhaps recently returned from fighting somewhere on the Continent.

I fell into a genre of long-form historical romance stories, many clearly produced with some combination of AI—generated writing, narration, and images. They tend to be set in an elastic version of 19th-century England, somewhere between the Regency and Victorian periods. If our duke has recently returned from war, it may be the Napoleonic Wars in earlier stories or the Crimean War in the later ones. Historical precision is not necessarily the main attraction, just that vague historical events produce our broken duke.

What has been surprising is how quickly I have acquired the vocabulary of this faux-19th-century universe: reticule, ducal seal, signet ring, dowry, marriage contract, estate ledger, bombazine (fabric), duke vs. earl, and the ton, the fashionable upper reaches of British society. There are carriages, beeswax candles, the smell of wool and wet horse, neglected estates, double entries in ledgers, invisible stepdaughters, nasty stepmothers, well-tailored jackets of broadcloth, shy heroines hiding behind potted palms at balls, marriages of convenience, and an astonishing number of men who speak in a "low scrape".

I didn't set out to learn any of this. The vocabulary arrived through repetition, one little algorithmically encouraged click at a time.

What I'm listening to is a kind of algorithmic pulp fiction. The technology may be new, but the machinery of the story is old. A wronged, overlooked woman is humiliated. Someone powerful finally sees what everyone else has failed to see. The nasty relatives are exposed. Fraud is revealed. Goodness is rewarded. And the duke eventually understands what the viewer (and most often just a listener) understood forty-five minutes earlier at the start of the story.

Then the story ends happily, and I click on another one.

That is the loop. YouTube learns that I will watch a story about an ignored stepdaughter and offers me another ignored stepdaughter. Perhaps this time with two cruel stepsisters and a kindly but very broke father. I click again, which presumably confirms that what I really need is a third ignored stepdaughter. Somewhere along the way the duke acquires a more prominent scar from temple to jawbone, just to add interest.

Why can't I stop listening?

Partly, I think, because good winning out has a universal appeal and perhaps even more so at this moment and time in my life. These 45- to 90-minute stories are auditory comfort food. We know roughly where they are going, and knowing is part of the pleasure. The attraction isn't suspense so much as promised emotional payback. However badly things go for the heroine in the first forty minutes, the ducal seal is waiting somewhere in the final twenty.

This makes the Duke Loop almost the inverse of the AI assistant loop. In the AI loop, repetition postpones resolution: one more exchange might finally get us out. In the Duke Loop, repetition guarantees resolution. The same machine starts up again, and that is precisely what we came for.

Loops Within Loops

By the end of August, our four loops were beginning to look less alike.

The vacation loop is a ritual. It repeats because repetition (in Italy) gives shape to the year: leave, disappear, return, begin again.

The coding loop is a cycle of enthusiasm. Pleasure and curiosity arrive in clumps, followed by stretches when our attention goes somewhere else. Nothing is particularly wrong with that.

The AI assistant loop is different. It is a trap. We stay in it because every next exchange looks as though it might finally resolve the previous one. Plus, the technology is still new, and we are all still learning how to use it efficiently.

And the Duke Loop is a reward machine. It keeps turning because it reliably gives us what we came for: recognition, justice, a happy ending, and apparently another estate ledger.

So perhaps the useful distinction isn't that loops are bad or good. Life contains plenty of repetition, and August itself is proof that repetition is not necessarily something to escape. Rituals, hobbies, seasons, stories, and habits all depend upon coming around again.

The more interesting question is how much control we have over the circle. In some loops, we are in the driver's seat. In others, we are passengers. Sometimes society has set the route long before we arrived as with vacations in Italy. And occasionally an algorithm is quietly deciding where the next turn will be as with our YouTube consumption.

That gives us a rough rule for these particular August loops. The coding loop doesn't need to be fixed. The vacation loop couldn't be fixed even if we wanted to; acceptance is better. The AI loop needs a circuit breaker. The Duke Loop...well, perhaps one more story, just until we find out whether poor quiet Eleanor (and they are always named Eleanor) wins over the scarred duke. (Spoiler: she does.)

There is one final loop hiding inside this post. We wrote about AI loops using research produced through conversations with AI assistants, including research about AI-generated romance stories being fed to us by another algorithm. At some point the snake begins eating its own tail. Is the future a form of funhouse recursion. Loops within loops?

And then, while writing the paragraph above, I remembered that I wrote a song called Endless Loop, about getting stuck inside expectations and repeating patterns around us. How easily I forget.

Apparently even our observations about loops come in loops.

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.

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.

Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness

There is a recognizable Italian vacation subculture: the summer Greek island escape whose value increases slightly when the island is less obvious, the route is more complicated, and the story requires a flowchart involving an airport, taxis, ferries, and perhaps a night in Piraeus. This post is about a contradiction that exists during that vacation. 

The desired vacation we are talking about here is presented as an escape from ordinary life. Yet it unfolds during the most synchronized moment of the Italian calendar, clustered around Ferragosto and the August shutdown. It is an escape performed almost collectively. Offices close, cities partially empty, and people disperse toward beaches, mountains, and islands on roughly the same timetable. 

Enjoying sunset on the island of Isolatos.

The recurring conversation

It begins like this: someone mentions where they’re going in August. The name is Greek, melodic, and not immediately placeable. People pull out their phones to see where the place is. The more remote or unknown, the better.

These conversations start in late spring and early summer, hiding months of careful planning. Inevitably, the details include the number of people in the village and the best tavernas in the chosen remote spot. To be clear: the fewer the better for both.

The central idea isn’t simply escapism but a curated remoteness: getting away, but in a culturally legible way that can be planned, narrated, and appreciated by others who understand the code. The logistical difficulty of the Greek vacation doesn’t undermine the escape. It authenticates it. This is a small fraction of Italians, but something we have noticed, likely tied to the socioeconomic circles we circulate in.

We confess to falling prey at times to this desire too. We want curated remoteness, but also authentic experience and connection to people and places — even if the connection is just with someone changing the sheets or serving us moussaka.

To further point the finger back at ourselves: we recently spent upwards of six hours planning a possible Greek-island getaway, all the while thinking about remoteness. (We won’t tell you which island...because we don’t want y’all to be there.)

A direct flight to a large island is useful. But a flight to Athens, a transfer to Piraeus, a ferry, and then perhaps another ferry to a smaller island can feel more like an achievement. You have not merely booked a beach holiday. You have discovered a place. The route becomes part of the story told before departure and again after returning.

There is also a mild form of distinction involved in all this. Mykonos is too obvious. Santorini is beautiful but compromised by the fact that everyone has heard of it. The ideal island is recognizable to the initiated but unfamiliar to at least some people around the dinner table. Its obscurity is a feature and the island name itself becomes a credential.

At dinner

As we were writing this, we went for dinner up on the Bergamo walls. Every summer, temporary venues pop up on the old city walls serving simple dishes with great views. At dinner, the 50+ group lamented modern travel: Too much is known; there are too many images of what to expect and what to do. They waxed fondly of times with just paper maps and hope to see something.

This is the same group who often talks about what we have called curated remoteness. Maybe the search is a reaction to modern travel, a need to recreate what it used to be like.

Some numbers

Ferragosto is a public holiday on August 15. The long August shutdown is a strong workplace and social convention that varies by industry, employer, and family situation, but nonetheless is powerful in Italy. ISTAT data show August as the central month of Italian summer tourism: in the third quarter of 2025, 39.3 percent of tourist nights in Italy fell in August, more than in July or September, and domestic tourists accounted for 53.3 percent of August stays. Those figures concern tourism within Italy, not Italian departures for Greece, but they support the broader idea of a synchronized vacation calendar.

According to the Bank of Greece, Greece received about 40.7 million inbound travelers in 2024. Just over 2.0 million came from Italy, an increase of 10 percent over 2023. That puts Italians at roughly 5 percent of all inbound travelers. In that year, Italian visitors generated about €1.23 billion in receipts, or roughly 5.7 percent of Greece’s total tourism receipts. Italy trails larger markets such as Germany and the United Kingdom, but it is plainly one of Greece’s important source markets.

The Italian data tell a similar story from the other direction. Banca d’Italia counted about 1.6 million Italian trips to Greece in 2024. Greece ranked sixth among foreign destinations by Italian spending, after Spain, the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Italians spent about €1.37 billion there. Greece accounted for 2.6 percent of Italian outbound trips but 4.2 percent of outbound spending.

Greece is not merely an archipelago awaiting Italians in linen shirts looking for a slice of remoteness. Some visitors take package holidays to Rhodes, Crete, or Corfu. Some arrive on cruise ships and spend a few hours in Santorini or Mykonos. Some visit Athens, Thessaloniki, or the mainland. Some are Greeks returning to islands they have visited for years. The search for the slightly obscure island reached by a sequence of conveyances is real, but it belongs to a segment of travelers rather than everyone.

Italians are not the dominant visitors to Greece, but they are not a negligible group either.

Homegrown

We suspect the idea of curated remoteness is much larger than Italy. It applies to countries with a certain wealth and vacation mentality. But perhaps the desire is more accentuated here because Italy has so many beaches, islands, and summer spots. In 2017 post Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, we wrote that Italy is surrounded by so much sea, it must compel Italians to seek it out ritualistically every summer, a ritual bordering on obligation.

But Italy’s homegrown abundance of sea and the crowded nature of the experience (Italians and people from elsewhere) make some Italians – our sample – more targeted in their search for remoteness. And that search leads them to Greece. Greece has more islands and more coastline than Italy, especially in the "island-dense, fragmented coastline" sense that matters for the Greek-island vacation idea. Uncharted frontier and new cultivated remoteness.

To be fair, the Italian "system" is set up such that vacation time is highly prescribed: August. Maybe the forced synchronization leads some Italians to look farther afield so as not to end up on a beach with other Italians.

We, on the other hand, have the flexibility to take vacations in different parts of the year. Italians are often perplexed when we tell them we are staying put for July and August, enjoying our adopted city, and not the sea or the mountains. We’ll take a vacation in the fall.

In the 2024 post Why do we travel?, we mused about why we travel at all. In our case, over the years the "why" has changed. Perhaps the observations in this post are just a passing phase for the group of friends we hang with.

Or maybe we are overthinking this: all this analysis is for naught and an Italian taking a vacation on a remote Greek island simply wants to get away from it all, Italy and their co-nationals. And that’s all.  

Happy summer vacation!  

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:

---

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

---

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.