A friend of mine has a very valuable car. It’s a Fiat Punto with over 250,000 km on it, a dent on one side and a door that doesn’t close properly on the other. That might not seem very glam, but here’s the thing: it’s still registered to his ex-girlfriend, an Australian who left Italy in 2008. He parks it wherever he wants.
You wouldn’t think that using a car in a town like Siena (60,000 people) would be particularly problematic, but Bernardo devotes plenty of time to devising ways to drive under the telecameras at the city gates without getting a ticket (for example, with the hatchback open, so the camera can’t see the license plate number) or park near his office in the center of the pedestrian zone without paying. Most of the time he uses (illegally) one of the half-dozen spaces in front of the pricey hotel across the piazza from his office. He once told me he “knew some guy” there, who kept an eye on his car. You can park in the public lot next to the hotel for 60 Euro cents an hour, so it hardly seems worth asking the favor, but I guess for some the principle of free parking matters a lot.
If Bernardo arrives late, and the hotel slots are full, he parks (illegally) around the corner in front the courthouse, putting a handicapped-parking pass on his dashboard. The original pass belonged to his Aunt Silvia’s neighbor, Lucia, a blind woman who lives across the hall in their apartment building near the Duomo. Bernardo had his aunt borrow the pass now and then on his behalf, and when color laser printers became relatively common, he made himself a pretty good copy. Continue reading Playing by the (Italian) Rules
The Truth About Tuscany 