Do You Need a Car in Italy? A Straight Look at Car, Train, and Driver

Let me answer a question I am asked constantly, and let me answer it the way we always do at Grand Tour: straight to the point, without frills, even at the risk of repeating myself, and even at the risk of making the odd enemy by saying the uncomfortable thing. Because the useful thing is not to flatter you; it is to tell you the truth. And the question is not really “how do you drive in Italy” — it is the one underneath: do you actually need a car in Italy at all? Is it worth renting one? Should you take the train instead? And if you do want the freedom of a car, should you be the one at the wheel, or should someone else? Let me try to bring a little clarity to all of it.

I should say at the outset that I am no enemy of the car — quite the opposite. I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, for work and for pleasure, and a great many of those miles were driven: the autostrada, the old statali, the tiny, twisting country lanes that barely take a car at all. I still drive constantly, to document the country for our films and to seek out new places to stay, and I love it. So none of what follows comes from any dislike of driving. It comes from a single, practical question that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you: for you, a foreign visitor with a limited number of precious days, does renting a car and driving it yourself actually make sense?

And before anything else, one conviction I will not soften, because it sits beneath the whole discussion. We at Grand Tour are firmly against the great city-to-city dash — hundreds and hundreds of kilometres swallowed every single day, one place ticked and abandoned for the next. Whatever you choose to travel in, choose it in the service of going slower, not faster.

Race from one city to the next all day long, and you are not discovering Italy — you are just running a race.

Driving in Italy is never just one thing

Here is the first thing almost no one tells you plainly: there is no single answer to “what is it like to drive in Italy,” because Italy is not a single place. This country is fragmented, broken into pieces, and its history has shaped every region, every city, every village differently — and that goes for its roads and its driving every bit as much as for its art and its food. Driving in a great city like Rome or Naples is a completely different proposition from driving through a quiet borgo or out in the open countryside. And it changes again between the north and the south.

Let me be straight about that, since we are here to be. The traffic in Naples, or in Palermo, is undeniably more chaotic; the driving is less disciplined, and it can be genuinely more demanding than it would be in a northern city. The north and the south of Italy are different in a hundred ways — both beautiful, equally beautiful, but with different characters — and this is simply one of those ways. City traffic, everywhere, is far more complicated than the open road, and harder on every driver in it, foreign or Italian. Out between the cities, on the other hand, driving is generally calm and safe; nothing much happens, and the journeys are a pleasure. And the Italian countryside, the small typical villages threaded along those minor roads — driving there can be a real joy. So far, so good. If it were only this, I would tell you to rent the car and go.

Where Italy does not make it easy: ZTL, cameras, and fines

But there is another factor, and it is the one that catches foreign visitors again and again, because it is invisible until the bill arrives. From the point of view of rules and fines, Italy does not help you — and I say that as an Italian who is used to it. There are a thousand different regulations, and they change from city to city: every historic centre does more or less as it pleases. These are the ZTL, the limited-traffic zones — the protected historic hearts of our towns, watched over by cameras, that you are simply not allowed to drive into without a permit. One city makes you pay in advance, another closes certain areas off completely, a third lets you drive straight in without a barrier or a soul to stop you — and you never notice that you were supposed to have paid. It is stressful even for us, who grew up with it.

And here is the part that stings, because you do not feel it happen. No one pulls you over. A camera photographs your plate as you cross the line, and that is that. Months later — and by law it can be up to a year later — the fine finds its way to you: the rental company hands over your name and address, adds its own administrative fee on top, and the notice lands in your mailbox back home. Worse, each separate gate you crossed is its own separate fine, so one wrong turn through a historic centre can become several of them at once. Then there are the speed cameras, the autovelox, often planted on very particular stretches — a road where you are sure the limit is one thing, when in fact a not-especially-visible sign a little way back had quietly lowered it, and you never registered the change. A flash, and the fine is already on its way, and it will arrive. This is a genuinely odious business, even to us; every so often a case blows up into a small national scandal, and yet nothing changes, and it carries on, above all on the provincial roads. One more practical note while we are here: to drive legally at all as an American, you need an International Driving Permit to carry alongside your own licence — a small thing, easily obtained before you leave, and easily forgotten until it is a problem.

So — car, train, or a driver?

Here, then, is my plain recommendation, and it is not the tidy one-word answer the internet loves. For the long moves between the great cities, the high-speed train is a genuine pleasure and I would take it every time — fast, comfortable, city centre to city centre, and none of the fines or the parking to think about. But the train has one real limit, and it is an important one: it cannot take you into the countryside around those cities — the territories just beyond the stations, which are so often the most beautiful, most surprising part of the whole trip, and which are reachable, realistically, only by car.

And this is exactly where the healthy rhythm of a real Italian journey reveals itself. You move from one city to the next in comfort by train; and then, once you have arrived, you take your time to know the area around it — and for that, you want a car. The way I see it, if you can manage it, the finest way to have the car’s freedom without any of its penalties is with a private driver — someone who knows the ground, who steers you clear of the ZTL and the cameras and the nasty surprises that would otherwise reach you by post, and who sets you down in the convenient places you simply cannot reach, or park, on your own. It is not, I know, a service within everyone’s reach. But if you ask me to name the best choice, that is it — the private driver for exploring, paired with the high-speed train for the longer hauls. And if that is not for you, and you want to take the wheel yourself for a few days in the countryside, do it with your eyes open to everything above, and keep it to the open roads and the villages, where driving in Italy is at its most rewarding and its least fraught.

Because in the end this was never really a question about cars at all. It is the same question that sits under everything we do: are you racing through Italy, or are you taking the time to understand it? Choose the way of moving that lets you slow down — and the country will open up in a way no amount of ground covered ever could.