License to Drive, Italian Style

Hey Americans, you know that DMV test you passed after flipping through a puny rulebook for 15 minutes? Guess what, Italy has 7,000 questions for you.

It’s always nice when your car matches your house (nope, not mine). All photos © Cheryl A. Ossola

An American friend wrote to me recently asking about the process of getting an Italian driver’s license. She’d heard that it’s difficult and can be taken only in Italian, and she wanted a spill-all. So here goes, with a disclaimer that I’m writing from my own experience and things may be different in other cities/regions.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s answer a few necessary questions: who needs an Italian driver’s license? Must the test be taken in Italian? How long does it typically take? And most important, can an American license simply be converted to an Italian one?

Who needs one? Any American who has been resident in Italy for a year. At that point you can no longer drive using your state license and an International Driving Permit (which you need to get in the U.S., and which is actually not a permit at all but a translation, into 10 languages, of your license). This means that if you plan to continue to drive after your first year of residence in Italy, you should plan ahead.

How long does it take to get a driver’s license in Italy? Let’s break it down. Let’s say you study for the written test for 12 to 24 weeks, then wait the mandatory 4 weeks after you pass (on your first try!), then do your 6 weeks of behind-the-wheel lessons (my school limited road lessons to once a week, which may or may not be standard), then your road test. The answer: typically 22 to 36 weeks, or roughly 6 to 9 months. Like I said, plan ahead. Yes, it’s a lot. And sure, some people have done it in less time. Maybe you will too!

But wait! What if I don’t declare residency? Can I still drive on my U.S. state-issued license after a year? Why yes, you can. You can also be in big trouble (like deportation-worthy trouble), because anyone staying in Italy longer than 90 days must be legally able to do so, via citizenship or a visa, and they must declare residency.

So let’s assume you’re a well-meaning, law-abiding American who’s moving to Italy legally and will want to continue to drive indefinitely. Unfortunately, your license doesn’t qualify for reciprocal recognition by the Italian Ministry of Transportation. (Possibly because the IMT doesn’t want to bother with making agreements with 50 states plus DC instead of with a single entity.) That means you must get an Italian license, and yes, in most cases you must take the test in Italian. I mean, this is Italy. We speak Italian here. That said, in some northern areas that border on France or Austria, the test is also given in French or German. But don’t assume, if you’ve declared residency in Calabria, for example, and you speak German, for example, you can bop up to Trentino to take the test in German. (More on that below.)

What does that mean for you English-only speakers or Italian-language newbies? Well, for one, you get to learn un sacco di new vocabulary (admit it, parabrezza is much more fun to say than “windshield”), which has the bonus effect of making it much easier for you to converse with your behind-the-wheel lessons instructor after you’ve passed the written test. (“What!” you shout, leaping up and spilling your cappuccino. “I already know how to drive!” I know. We’ll get to that in a minute.) Plus, you’ll have actual knowledge about the rules and laws of the road, so you’ll know when everyone else is breaking them.

The preparation

Have you calmed down? Swapped your cappuccino for vino? Okay then, let’s go on. Wherever you’ve declared residency, that’s where you’ll need to take your tests. You can’t live in Perugia, for example, and test at the motorizzazione (equivalent to the DMV) in nearby Assisi, much less a different region. Accept it. Talk to some autoscuole, read the reviews if any, or simply choose one close to home (because you may have lost your right to drive by the time you do this and thus will be busing or hoofing it). You’ll be devoting a lot of time (and money) to this school, so hopefully it’s at least a semi-pleasant arrangement.

“But wait,” you say, “can’t I just study on my own?” You can, and many people do. However, you can’t get the official book (the SIDA Manuale della Patente A e B, which also gives you access to a school-linked practice test app) unless you’re registered with a school. (Sure, you could maybe borrow the SIDA manual, but you wouldn’t have the app that goes with it.) And trust me, the SIDA book is better. I studied and took practice tests on my own for months before signing up with a school, and I think I wasted a lot of time. I used a book written in both English and Italian, and when I switched to the SIDA manual I realized that having the translation right there on the page wasn’t actually helpful. You need to be able to understand the Italian, and that’ll happen sooner if you immerse yourself in the content by looking up words, trying to relate the text to the accompanying images, and learning through repetition.

But do you have to enroll at an autoscuola? Yes, at least for the mandatory behind-the-wheel lessons. You can go directly to the motorizzazione to schedule your written test, which will save you some money, though my understanding is that they typically have very few spots open to non-school-affiliated applicants. Be prepared to deal with a ton of forms (such as proof of payment of fees at the post office, copies of ID and codice fiscale, and the proper modello [form], completed) and a probably opaque process riddled with bureaucratic nonsense.

If you prefer to save yourself a lot of headaches, an autoscuola will handle all the back-and-forth with the motorizzazione for you. You’ll need to provide passport photos, ID, and a doctor’s certification that you have no health reasons not to drive. (There’s a particular form the family doctors need to fill out, and most of them know exactly what to do.) A vision test is required, and your school will make that available to you. Some schools might include the vision test fee (about €20) in their fee package, but mine didn’t.

My extremely well-used SIDA manual now lives in my car.

The classes

So, let’s say you’ve opted not to face the motorizzazione by yourself. When you register at a school, the expectation is that you will take both classroom and behind-the-wheel lessons; however, some schools will allow you to take the written test after studying on your own. (I know people who say they did this because they didn’t know Italian well enough to understand the teacher.) Either way, the teacher will assess your readiness for the test. Also either way, you’ll pay the full tuition (which includes the road-test fee and a bunch of other stuff), which typically is somewhere in the neighborhood of €800. Yes, it’s expensive. Please stop swearing.

When I took the classroom lessons we were in semi-lockdown, so we met via Zoom. My teacher spoke at warp speed, mumbling most of the time, but the slides and written explanations made everything somewhat intelligible. Was it worthwhile? Hard to say, but at least it gave me an hour a week of forced language study. I’m sure an in-person classroom situation would be much better.

When you’re registered with a school and using the SIDA app, teachers have access to your practice test results, so they know when you’re ready to test. Then they schedule it—hopefully relatively soon, but not necessarily, because each school gets to send only two students on a given test date. (This might not be true in other regions; I have no idea.) Quite possibly some instructors aren’t as concerned as mine was about test readiness, because on the day I tested, a shocking 30 percent of the students failed. I know this because they called us up one at a time to get our scores, and the students who didn’t pass were called first, and the rest of us could hear what they were told. Brutal.

The written test

The app is humongous. You can study by topic, which is what I did for a long time, or by taking a typical test. I did topic-specific tests (there are many for each topic) until I consistently made fewer than four errors, then switched to the mixed-topic tests.

Of the 7,000 possible questions, your written test will include 30, and of those, you can miss up to 3 (down from 40 and 4, respectively, when I tested.) In other words, a passing score is 90 percent or better. By the way, I thought my actual test was easier than most of the practice tests I took. And perhaps it’s best to warn you now: you will take hundreds, many hundreds, of practice tests.

Tip: the actual test will always include several questions about right of way, or precedenza, and la distanza di sicurezza between moving vehicles, so make sure you’ve got those down.

Some sample questions and answers.

Along with rules of the road, signage, speed limits, the VAST topic of precedenza, types of roads, parts of a car, and every single component of a roadway, you’ll study the various types of licenses and the requirements for each (una stupidaggine, in my opinion), various types of trucks and motorcycles and engines (an even greater stupidaggine), what to do in an emergency or in a dangerous situation such as an accident or breakdown, and emergency care for injured people (definitely not una stupidaggine). In Italy, if you encounter an accident and see unattended victims, you are legally obligated to help them. You are also legally obligated to carry a first-aid kit, a reflective hazard marker, and a safety vest to wear while placing said marker.

Speaking of speed limits, when I was in Italy as a tourist years ago, I was zipping along the autostrada and wondering how fast I should be going. I couldn’t find a speed limit sign, and that’s because speeds aren’t posted unless they’re deviations from the norm or a return, after a deviation, to that norm. Or a minimum speed. And maybe some other circumstances I’m forgetting right now. Anyway, you’re expected to learn all the default speed limits for various types of roads and vehicles.

Now, about that pesky Italian language. I know people who claim to barely speak Italian who have passed the test on the first try. I don’t know if they memorized the questions and answers (and if so, kudos to them, given the 7,000 possibilities) or if they understand more Italian than they let on. In any case, be prepared for convoluted, bureaucratic over-speak that purposely tries to trip you up. And don’t think that once you learn a certain verb, you’re good. Whoever wrote the test questions has an inordinate fondness for synonyms.

Tip: some of the most important vocabulary words you’ll need to know are those that impose a condition on the situation at hand, making them key to determining whether a test question is true or false: words like during, while, only, before, after, can be, should be, always, and so on.

The 6 mandatory hours behind the wheel

So, you’ve passed your written test and waited the requisite month; now you’re ready to get behind the wheel. If you’re American—especially if you’re an American woman—and you can drive a manual transmission car, your instructor will be shocked. He will also try to change your driving technique, even if yours is a decades-old habit. And he will yell at you. A lot.

Here’s the good news for anyone who’s about to get behind the wheel and doesn’t live in Perugia: you don’t live in Perugia! I’ve driven in Milano, New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago—and Perugia is by far the worst. Its roads are terrible, convoluted and full of lanes that end abruptly, potholes, and irregular surfaces, and they’re often devoid of necessary pavement markings. Or sometimes the markings are so faded you can barely see them. This might mean they need repainting—or, as my instructor cheerfully told me one day when I waited to move into a lane until I’d passed the diagonal stripes that forbade such movement, it might mean they’re no longer valid. Chissà! Who knows!

At one intersection that always made my instructor tense up (unnecessarily, I must add, because I always nailed it), a left turn is required, putting you smack-dab into a bus lane for oncoming traffic, at which point you must immediately move to the right lane (which no, you couldn’t access before you made the turn), ideally before you get smushed by a bus. Once you’re familiar with such intersections, they’re fine, but the first time is always an adventure.

Another reason Perugia is a new-to-driving-in-Italy driver’s nightmare is the signage. The streets may lack lane stripes and lines indicating a stop, but boy oh boy do the signposts bristle with information. You can come whizzing out of a roundabout only to see, flashing past you, eight or ten signs giving directions and/or warnings.

This is a conservative amount of signage for Perugia., and not terribly confusing since it’s mostly directional.

If your driving instructor is anything like mine, they’ll not only yell at you, they’ll enjoy yelling at you. Mine liked to yell whenever I had the right of way and didn’t barrel on through without flinching, even though he knows that plenty of drivers think yield signs don’t apply to them. So yes, sometimes I’d commit the cardinal sin of slowing to make sure I wasn’t going to get broadsided. My bad.

One day my instructor went truly ballistic. We were approaching a big intersection (my first time driving there), and ahead, on a median strip to my left, was a traffic light, to my right was a jungle of signs, and coming at me was a line of traffic that veered left. My instructor told me to turn right, but he didn’t mention that a hard right would put me—surprise!—in what had suddenly become a bus lane. Well, I blew it. Seeing the line of cars turning in front of me, I turned into the lane closer to me, which, of course, was the bus lane I’d failed to realize was there. Turns out I was supposed to make a soft right and merge with those oncoming cars, at which point we would miraculously braid ourselves into one lane without incident. My instructor grabbed the wheel, shouting, “Didn’t you see the sign?” and I yelled back something about not having read all 85 of the signs, and besides, I was more concerned with the traffic light and the cars HEADED STRAIGHT FOR US. We both yelled, then fumed. So much fun.

The road test

For the road test, you’ll need to check your mirrors and so on, park by backing up into a space (no parallel parking required, which is a mystery), and take a little jaunt wherever the test instructor tells you to go. If the instructor says nothing, you simply follow the strada principale (main road), which sometimes isn’t as obvious as it seems—at least not in Perugia.

On the day of my road test, my autoscuola instructor was confident. He knew which test instructor I’d have and told me what to expect from her. Then we arrived at the motorizzazione and found out that the test instructor that day was a he, not a she. Now my suddenly anxious instructor was giving me lots of last-minute instructions and warning me that this guy would talk a lot and not to let him distract me.

We set off, and sure enough, the test instructor was chatty, very curious about why an American would leave the U.S. and come to live in Perugia, of all places, and so on. I didn’t want to offend him, so I answered his questions, but briefly. Even so, I was distracted—which meant that when we got to a huge roundabout with several lanes going flanking it on either side, for a split second I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go. Then, realizing I needed to bypass the exterior lanes and enter the roundabout (after yielding if necessary), I did so. But I yielded late and abruptly.

That moment of confusion turned out to be my downfall. “Signora, Lei ha commesso un grave errore,” the test instructor said—and in that moment I knew I’d flunked. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been driving for 45-ish years—all of them accident free except for one time when I, then a teenage driver, backed into a post in a parking garage—and this guy flunked me.

My autoscuola instructor fought hard for me. Yes, I should have yielded sooner, but it wasn’t a grave error because I did yield. Oh, but it was grave, the test instructor said, because who could say, perhaps I wasn’t going to yield at all. My autoscuola instructor was furious and disgusted; I was furious and embarrassed. For the next month, I kicked myself and worried about getting the same test instructor again.

I needn’t have worried. (And you shouldn’t worry about flunking; I don’t know anyone else who has, unless they’re keeping mum.) A month later I tested again, this time with the woman we’d expected the first time. She sat in the back of the car in blissful-to-me silence, only speaking to give me a directional command. We spent 10 minutes on the road instead of almost 30. And when my instructor told her why the other tester had flunked me, she couldn’t believe it. “You drive very well,” she said to me, handing me my hard-earned license. I wanted to kiss her.

Now, a year and a half later, after all those months of study, I remember most of the rules of the road but nothing about motorcycle engine sizes and the speed limits of long-haul trucks. I have no idea which trailers or campers can do what, or how old you need to be to get a motorcycle license. What I do know is how to be more aggressive (read: survivalist) on the road than I’d ever been in the U.S., to be more creative about parking (always with respect and safety in mind), and to bend the rules at times.

These days I drive a red Toyota sized perfectly for medieval streets. My treasured license, I think, should have “bat out of hell” stamped on it. Because, as the saying goes, when in Rome . . . you know what to do.

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Book of the week:

• La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind (US) or An Italian in Italy (UK) by Beppe Severgnini (specifically, in “Friday: Day One: From Malpensa to Milan,” the second part, “The highway, or the psychopathology of the stoplight”)