Please do an Italian Job on our motorways
TAORMINA, Sicily, is one of my favourite places and I’ll never forget sitting on a seat carved from stone in its ancient Greek Theatre while the Philharmonia Orchestra gave it laldy as Mount Etna – in full eruption – lit the night sky.
Now President Trump and the G7 gang are off there and it’s a security nightmare. The town was not, you see, built with The Beast in mind. That is the bomb-and-bullet proof vehicle officially called Cadillac One, centrepiece of Presidential motorcades.
The town’s roads are too narrow and twisty, so the Secret Service is looking at plonking an aircraft carrier in the Ionian Sea and flying Trump via a Navy Seahawk helicopter.
The Sicilians are unimpressed. ‘They are driving us mad,’ mayor Eligio Giardina says after batting away plans to bulldoze the classical beauty of the town’s main drag, Corso Umberto, into an LA-style eight-lane freeway.
But I’m with the Pres. Driving in Italy is, eh, challenging.
On my first visit to Sicily in 1992, the crater from the Mafia bomb that killed judge Giovanni Falcone had barely been filled in and the army – in uniforms by Armani – were everywhere.
I drove to Palermo via a loop of interconnected motorways. The Mafia were said to have had the contract for the concrete and steel and so made the architect an offer he couldn’t refuse regarding its scale. We were on a giant highway that, using dozens of bridges and tunnels, marched straight across spectacular terrain. What could go wrong?
Well, there was this old-style Fiat 500 that abruptly stopped as its driver tried to better appreciate a Ferrari roaring up a slip road. I nearly ran right into his didietro.
A Ducati motorbike rocketed past, its speedo well into three figures. The rider was in shirtsleeves but he had a helmet – perched over one elbow.
In a hilltop village, I stopped at a red light to the fury of drivers behind me. Puce-faced, they pulled past, ignoring both the light and the Polizia Municipale. They are like traffic wardens. Traffic wardens with Beretta 9mm automatics on their hips, that is.
YEARS later near Amalfi, south of Naples, the sat-nav guided us through a one-way system to a hole-in-the-wall cash machine. The wall in question was a 40ft thick mediaeval one into which the road vanished.
A sign warned: ‘1.9m max width.’ My Punto was 1.6m wide according to the handbook. Wing mirrors folded, I breathed in…
But while driving in Italy, particularly in her cities and especially in Palermo, can be like the chariot scene from Ben Hur, their roads generally knock ours into a cocked hat.
Outside Positano in Campania last year, streets that bake by day and freeze by night and face the rigours of earth tremors were still smooth as a caffè crema.
The toll-roads to Naples show the M8, all potholes, patch-ups and traffic jams, for what it is – a ribbon of human misery and a national disgrace.
The Beast might not be able to make the turns in Taormina but its suspension would be fine.
Perhaps ineffectual Transport Minister Humza Yousaf, amazingly still in post, could explain to Scots motorists with burst tyres and bent alloys where we’re going wrong.