Italian bureaucracy!!! That was our lesson today!
We visited beautiful Pietrasanta, we were stunned at the beauty of the Cathedral and really liked the atmosphere of the square so much so that we wanted to eat lunch there. Therefore we had to go back and move the car as we were in a parking lot that allowed for one hour only.
We arrive back at the car 40m minutes after leaving it to find a incomprehensible, yet identifiable parking ticket…….. the lady parking enforcer was just a few cars down. We being me with my strong sense of justice and fairness decided to approach said “enforcer” and explain that we had only been gone 40 minutes not the one hour allowed.
Between her little English and my even smaller Italian and a visit from her “Boss” we established that yes we may have only been there 40 minutes however the ticket was for…. not writing the time we arrived on a piece of paper and leaving it on our dashboard!!! Duh!
I kindly asked them to show me where this notice was displayed……… the boss did
Do you know what that symbol means?
not seem to agree with me that this was a little obscure.
OK lets put this to the vote what do you think this means? (apart from 1 hour of parking between 8am & 20.00pm? Please leave your input below….
Apparently this hieroglyphic means that you have to leave the time you arrived on your dashboard…….. apparently this is commonplace amongst the locals who have their own little handy dandy cards with them. How the heck are people such as ourselves i.e tourists supposed to know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Two very valuable lessons learned today!
1) Don’t expect justice or fairness from traffic enforcers
2) Keep quiet, get in the car, then rip the ticket into little shreds!
By expecting fair play we were forced into paying the ticket on the spot…. as we were not a Italian registered vehicle! If we did not pay the fine, they threatened to take away (i.e. tow) our car!!! The fine of €39 is what we would have spent and more on a nice little lunch at Michelangelo’s Bar! Well done you traffic enforcers….. you just took money away from your towns businesses and really ticked off a couple of Canadian tourists, who intend to make sure that everyone hears about this.
Funny thing is we have been in Italy for 2 weeks now and we have never seen this bizarre system before! Travellers beware Italian bureaucracy is not a force to be reasoned with!!!
Well that’s a new one on me, looks like parking between here and ………… wherever there is – tricky little devils aren’t they!
That calls for an extra bottle of wine. We had french plates on our car as we had rented it in Paris for the drive to Italy, and that’s what the owners of our B&B in Tuscany thought we got picked on for..who knows, apparently it happens often. Thanks for the alert, we’ll watch for that on our next trip to Italy (meanwhile back to the wine…….)
Bruce has driven all over the world too, and found Italy by far the MOST challenging and I found it downright scary, though the awesome food and wine helps. Cheers, B&L