Driving in Italian cities without GPS not recommended!

We're home! Enjoying our other life
again in Montecarlo, Toscana.

Dang, how did anyone get anywhere in Italy before GPS? We arrived in Firenze Saturday evening, and though I had activated my Italian phone during our layover in Germany, for some reason I had only phone service, with no data. Therefore, after I got in my rental car and tried to drive back to the airport to pick up Lucy and our luggage, I almost immediately got lost. I had walked about 15 minutes to the rental car agency, but the routes for a walker and a driver are very, very different. Italian cities are full of one-way streets that are almost never straight for very long. When I took that first wrong turn, the street quickly looped in the opposite direction of the airport.

Most Italian cities do not have streets set up in a grid format, and many streets are one-way only.

I didn’t realize how much in the opposite direction I was going. I was looking for signs to take me back to the airport, but apparently, they don’t put these signs up for people going in the exact wrong direction, which makes sense. Gas stations in the city are almost all self-serve, with no attendant on duty, and most streets had no other places to pull over and ask for directions. Every once in a while, I’d see an airport sign and follow it, but at the next intersection, there would be no sign. Or there would be 15 signs, and I would frantically try to scan them all while the drivers behind me honked impatiently.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me at least 50 minutes to get back to the airport. I had no way to contact Lucy during this time, so she was wondering and worrying. Then we faced a second problem: Finding our bed and breakfast without working GPS. We made a brief effort, but after realizing again that we’d taken a wrong turn and now had no idea which direction to go, I decided to give up and just drive to our home in Montecarlo. Ahead of me was the familiar onramp for the A11 autostrada, and I knew I could find my way home from there, so I pulled over, called the Airbnb proprietor and said we weren’t coming after all. We only live an hour from the airport, so it really wasn’t that hard to stay awake. I’m not really sure why I had planned to stay the night in Firenze anyway.

Afterword: The next week, I went to the phone store we frequent in Altopascio, and the clerk there showed me that I need to sign up for a specific data plan with my provider. Hopefully, I’ll be able to figure this out on my own next time. It’s hard to believe that anyone ever survived in Italy without GPS. However, I should add that driving in the countryside in Italy is not at all difficult, nor is driving on an autostrada. Don't take my story as advice to avoid renting a car. I would say to make sure you have access to GPS, and avoid driving in large cities if at all possible. The biggest risk about driving in cities is not actually getting lost but getting ticketed for accidentally driving in a limited traffic zone (ZTL).