The visual delight of Italian road signs

(Part I of a series on Driving in Italy.)

The architecture, the design, the paintings, the love of pageant and opera—few other cultures are as visually-obsessed as the Italians. This visual exuberance even extends to Italian road signs. There are literally hundreds of different types of signs that warn, chide, and advise about almost any situation you could imagine yourself encountering on the road when driving in Italy.

Italian road signs almost always come in groups and tell little short stories about a section of road through their hieroglyphic language. Sometimes it feels like there’s an Italian grandmother sitting in the passenger seat, delivering a monologue while I am driving. “Watch out, sometimes there are deer and boar on this road. Why Giuseppe hit a deer 15 years ago! And even though it is July, it can freeze and be slippery around this curve in the winter! And your tires could pick up gravel and possibly hit someone walking by the road. SLOW DOWN big curve coming! Did I mention that when it rains a lot it can flood here? WATCH OUT—soft shoulder!” And all this can be delivered in about 20 feet of road signs. With more around the next bend.

When we took the very hard test to get our Italian driver licenses, and had to memorize the meanings of hundreds of signs, I was particularly amused by this sign of a car falling off a dock into the water and could hardly imagine a context when it might be necessary to use it. Then I went for the weekend to the tiny Isola del Giglio in the Tuscan archipelago and discovered why it exists in the road sign oeuvre.

More about the Italian visual nature in one of my favorite books about Italy, Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy. There’s a fascinating chapter about the British preference for the written word and the Italian preference for visual communication, and how it plays out in the culture.