Gaining insights into European currency, traffic and large quantities of food.
		-- by Dave Barry [09/25/93]

	Recently, in an effort to gain insights into the European 
currency crisis, not to mention large quantities of weight, my 
family and I went to Italy. 
	Our plan was to rent a car and drive around on winding, 
picturesque Italian roads. Because we are international travel 
sophisticates, we went in the middle of August, which is when the 
entire population of Italy, including statues, goes on vacation. 
It turns out that the No. 1 Italian vacation activity is to get 
in a car and drive around on winding, picturesque roads, at 
approximately the speed of light. 
	I imagine that some traffic maneuvers are illegal in 
Italy. For example, you're probably not allowed to drive your car 
over a uniformed police officer without signaling. But other than 
that, pretty much anything goes. When we picked up our car in 
Rome, I asked a man for directions; he told me to start by 
driving the wrong way up a one-way street. 
	"Isn't that a one-way street?" I asked.
	"Yes," he said, shrugging. "But who reads the signs?" As 
far as I could tell, in 10 days of driving around Italy, there is 
only one strict traffic regulation: You are NOT allowed to be 
behind another motorist. If somebody is in front of you, you 
MUST, by law, get past this person, even if you are on a winding, 
hillside road the width of a strand of No. 8 spaghetti, next to a 
humongous cliff. Several times I was passed by drivers who, as 
far as I could tell, got past me by driving right off the cliff's 
edge, so that their cars were briefly hanging right out in space, 
the way the cartoon Road Runner does. 
	We were on many small roads, because we stayed in some 
picturesque hill villages built a thousand years ago by people 
who put massive stone walls around them to indicate that these 
villages were never intended for automobile traffic. But you have 
to try to drive in them anyway, to reach your hotel. To do this, 
you follow a series of arrows, apparently put up by prankster 
villagers, which lead you through a winding maze of streets, 
sometimes passing the same point four or five times before 
reaching the center of the town, where the pranksters laugh and 
laugh as you inch your car through streets so narrow that they 
make the winding, hillside road look like the New Jersey 
turnpike, with stone walls practically scraping your car on both 
sides and even overhead, so that you appear to be driving inside 
ancient Roman air-conditioning ducts, clenching the wheel in 
terror, convinced that you're about to drive into somebody's 
living room. The only indication that you are on a legal 
automotive thoroughfare is that occasionally an Italian driver 
will pass you, if necessary by driving on your roof. 
	Once we reached the hotel, we did fine, thanks to my 
sophisticated international knowledge of Italian. I had memorized 
the Italian expressions for "I do not speak Italian," and "Do you 
speak English?" As a result, on two occasions, I strode 
confidently up to the hotel desk person and stated, in crude 
Italian, "I do not speak English." Fortunately, the Italians are 
low on snoot, so we were treated well despite communicating like 
tourist versions of Tonto ("We stay in room with toilet, yes?"). 
We ate many wonderful meals in the Italian style, wherein they 
keep bringing you more courses, and when you finally stagger away 
from the table, they follow you to your room and stuff food into 
your mouth while you sleep. We also saw several hundred thousand 
important and historic ruins, cathedrals, statues, paintings, 
frescoes, mosaics, arches, relics, etc., which eventually formed 
one massive unforgettable throbbing historic blob in our minds. 
	At one point, we were in a very important church in 
Venice, and a guide was pointing toward the historic spot where 
St. Mark was entombed, and my son, looking impressed, said, 
quote, "THE St. Mark?" 
	But of all our experiences, the one I remember most 
vividly was when we were in the Dolomite Alps, an area of 
historical importance and spectacular natural beauty, and I 
realized -- as perhaps such visitors as Hannibal and Napoleon had 
realized before me -- that our passports were missing. So I 
reported this loss to the local police, who typed up and handed 
me a detailed document that I believe said, in Italian: "The 
people holding this document have no idea what it says, but it 
will certainly get them out of our hair. Thank you."
	In my sophistication, I actually believed that this 
document would be an adequate replacement for our passports. You 
can imagine how comical this seemed to the authorities when we 
got to the Milan airport and attempted to leave Italy. So our 
plane took off without us, and we got to spend a whole extra day 
in Italy, rearranging our travel plans and trying to prove to the 
American Consulate that we were Americans and should be permitted 
to return home. During this process, I thought a lot about Sheik 
Omar Abdel-Rahman, whom our government cheerfully admitted 
despite the fact that he listed his occupation, on his visa 
application, as "Terrorist Loon." 
	Not that I am bitter. 
	Anyway, we eventually got home, bringing with us valuable 
insights into the European currency situation, the main one being 
that if you go over there, you should take a lot of it. 
	
