Cramping your style …

Mind the gap when entering your car

Italy, the land of lemons, bitter orange and automobilisti. Well, I confess I don’t know the names of the different Italian lemon varieties, but Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Lamborghini and Ferrari have been engraved in my memory since the 60s – trained in countless breaks in the school playground, with the then absolutely hip car version of “Happy Families”. “12 cylinder Ferrari” would have been the certain game winner, if only the number of seats hadn’t been the deciding factor.

However, hardly anyone had then seen one of these sports cars in real life anyway. Even the anointed ones who drove to the Adriatic with their parents in the VW Beetle (at the back) during the “big holidays”, hardly ever saw a Ferrari, Lamborghini etc. on Italian roads. How could they? Italian roads were even narrower than German country roads and full of racing bikes, three-wheeled vans and Fiat 500s. Italian sports cars were the dream of my youth – perhaps a fiction, but technologically leading edge. What is Italy like automobilistically today?

On the roads, you see significantly more German and French models than the legends of Italian automotive engineering. However, anyone who drives here with a German licence plate is a traffic obstruction as a matter of principle. It doesn’t matter whether you stick to speed limits, or slightly over (10 km/h as usual in German city centres) – or just “let it rip”. If you’re not overtaken on the inside and outside at the same time, it’s almost an Italian accolade to automotive maturity.

I was all the more surprised when we were able to experience an innovation in an Italian multi-storey car park that I have been missing in Germany for years: a multi-storey car park with space not only for cars, but also for people!  Anyone who has ever desperately tried to “board” their car again after being so squeezed in by an SUV that you can only get in through the tailgate, knows what I mean. What is so difficult about having space for cars AND FOR THEIR DRIVER? I don’t know!

I’m so glad that Italian engineers and architects have obviously managed to solve this problem in such an elegant, typically Italian way.

Bella Italia

Autor: UTO
Übersetzung ins Englische: BCO

Bildquellen

  • Vorsicht beim Einsteigen …: Karl-Heinz Laube/pixelio.de
  • IMG_4710: Bildrechte beim Autor

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