Holiday in Tuscany: 6. Driving in Tuscany – The long and winding road…
One thing to be aware of when planning sightseeing excursions in Tuscany, is that although distances may seem short on the map, it is going to take a lot longer than you expect to get to your destination.
Of course this does not apply when you take the highway (“autostrada”), as these tend to be straight and fast. However, on the stretch between Firenze and Siena the speed limit is lowered to 90km/h because of the (bad) state of the road. In Belgium we have a running joke that you can feel when you are entering Belgium by car from abroad because of the bad road conditions. But after driving up and down between Siena and Firenze a couple of times I now know that worse is possible. Especially in the right (slow) lane it is so bad that it feels more like a ride in a fairground attraction than a car – we just couldn’t help laughing out loud at how we were being bumped around in our seats.
Luckily the condition of secondary roads is a lot better – excellent mostly. But there the problem is that the roads never seem to go straight for more than just a couple of hundred meters. It’s curve after bend after curve… going on endlessly. And many of the curves are really tight, so your average speed drops like a rock.
As a result, a trip of barely 50km can easily eat up an hour and a half or so of your valuable holiday time. Add to that the heightened concentration required for driving from bend to bend on roads that you don’t know, in hilly terrain, the behavior of other drivers with opposite traffic often cutting corners (see one of my previous posts about driving in Tuscany), and locals who do know the road by heart sticking to your rear bumper… and the trip feels like it takes even longer than it already does. It raises your fatigue level too, so you end up being really glad when you finally reach your destination.
To give you an example: we foolishly decided we would drive down to the coast, and thought Cecina was the best option since it was only about 100km by mostly secondary roads (via Siena, Colle Val d’Elsa, and Volterra), while Viareggio, the closest coastal city reachable by highway, was 175km and would take us via Siena, Firenze, and Lucca, which we thought was too much. So we took the shorter route, but ended up spending about two and a half hours in the car on our way there (and as much on the way back in the evening of course). Five hours in the car in order to spend a couple of hours on a very crowded beach (and I mean ‘very’ as in ‘just one meter between you and your neighbors’) – don’t know if I would do it again 
.
So beware: the Tuscan countryside is extremely beautiful, with many interesting places to visit, but you will need a lot of time to see it all, much of which will be spent in the car getting there and back.
G
