Driving in Italy, our challenges - Expat Living in Italy

since we've gotten to Italy we've gotten into a few situations where we were wondering did we just get scammed we're Debbie and staying and this is our Italian Destiny what I'm talking about is car ownership and driver's licenses in particular we'll talk to you about what happened to us and how you can avoid it well let's get out of this heat and go talk inside about the specifics for our scenario and what you might experience when you come to it the first thing I wanted to talk about was how we sort of got caught with our pants down with regards to the driver's licenses we've traveled a lot and we should know this more than likely but whenever you drive in Italy under an American license you need to have an international driving permit me having a Belgian license I did not require it so unfortunately when we were pulled over by the police Debbie was driving and it turned out she did not have the international driving permit as we were struggling through language barrier with the police officers they offered us a deal the deal being that if we paid cash immediately then we could get a discount on the fine it seemed a bit dodgy but apparently there is such a thing where I think it was almost 40 percent or 35 discount that we got the ticket was still over 280 Euros and of course from that point forward until Debbie obtained the international driving permit uh she could no longer drive so we paid the ticket we moved on and we learned our lesson uh for you Americans that watch this uh it's very easy to obtain your International driving permit just reach out to AAA I think it's 20 or 25 dollars to get the permit sent your way and then that is valid all over the world there might be some countries that are exceptions but you know let's say it's largely valid all over the world the validity for this past is one year so if you do plan to spend either multiple trips it might be worthwhile to get a new one uh if you're going to be abroad for an extended period another thing that we've heard a lot of expats struggle with is driver's license conversion from outside of the EU into Italy now within Europe countries have different approaches to license exchange for example Debbie was able to get a Belgian license by simply exchanging her American one for a Belgian one but in Italy that's not an option so what happens is people buy a property here they move here from let's say the United States and they expect to be able to transfer their American Driving rights I guess and record uh over here well you cannot do that the problem becomes that after one year of being here you can no longer use that International driving permit we just talked about and you must obtain your Italian driver's license you are literally considered to be a new driver in the Italian system which comes with quite a few limitations now we'll talk about the limitations in a minute but first how does obtaining this license work well the Italian driving license process is pretty complicated much more complicated than in the United States there's thousands of questions that you have to memorize and most importantly you can only do the tests in the Italian language there is not a path for you to do it in any other language be it English or something else so that really puts a lot of folks in a bind because generally speaking many Americans that move here will be doing this as part of their retirement or maybe they're close to retirement where perhaps learning a language or learning a language if it's even simply for obtaining a driver's license can be a real struggle so keep that in mind when you move here driving can be a challenge if you are unable to to pass this test within the first year let's say of getting here considers you a new driver regardless of your age or your driving record or anything like that which means that you're also subject to the same rules that an Italian new driver is there are three key things that you are limited by first of all it's the horsepower that your engine can have in your car here they look at kilowatt but any car that you drive cannot have more than 55 kilowatts the second thing is that you on the freeway the speed limit here is 130 kilometers per hour which is roughly 80 to 85 miles per hour as a new driver you're limited you can only drive 100 miles per hour which is 60 to 65 miles per hour as well as you are limited in your blood alcohol level while obviously you should never have any blood uh any blood in your alcohol any alcohol in your blood and there is a limit that is non-zero for Italian drivers however the first three years that you're a new driver the limit is de facto zero so for one year you're limited in the the capacity the power of your engine the for three years you're limited in both the speed that you can go on the freeway as well as your blood alcohol level I really like this in the summer it's just water with some lemon and some cucumber the Cucumber from our garden the lemons we haven't successfully grown any lemons but uh we're working on it the next struggle that I wanted to talk about was car ownership for somebody who owns a property here it is not because you own a property in Italy that you're therefore also allowed to purchase a vehicle the Italian law limits ownership of vehicles to those that reside in the country which means that for many people who may be here multiple times per year for shorter periods let's say a month here and a month there they have to rent a car every time which is very annoying because you've seen how car rental prices have evolved over the course of the past few years in the US especially but also in Europe it's gone the same way it's become very expensive so keep that in mind as an Italian you cannot as sorry as an Italian homeowner you don't automatically have the right to own a vehicle here if you're a resident you can and there are no limitations you can buy any vehicle but again keep in mind that if you have a recently acquired driver's license in Italy you may not have access to the full scope of vehicles that are out there as we just mentioned we imported our car so when we first made it to Europe in 2020 we had planned to travel around Europe and we were looking for a used car that we could use for these trips or for this endless trip let's say and we ended up buying not knowing we ended up buying an Italian car so we have a Fiat Tipo which was from 2019 and we purchased that vehicle kind of new it only had six eight miles or so six seven eight miles on the on the odometer so it was new although it had been sitting for a year um when we moved to Italy rather than sell our car in Belgium and buy another different car over here we decided to import the car and we did this full well knowing full well that there were some inconveniences associated with this process there were a few inconvenience uh two in particular one is the cost where depending on the the power and the the potency of your vehicle there's a fee that's associated with the importing of our car and then the second thing is that while you're going through the importation process you are unable to drive that vehicle so what happens is you go to a an office that does this that does import Vehicles be it trailers cars motorhomes whatever and what they will do is they will log a ticket with a regional office that does the import some of them are slower than others the one close by to us in peruja is extremely slow so the offices even those right around us are choosing to go with different locations ours I believe used Rimini as the like an office to work with to import the car now what they require is for us to hand over the original documents to the vehicle so the the title essentially of our vehicle is no longer in our hands and as such we cannot legally drive the vehicle because you have to have that with you when you're on the road so for us we were thankfully uh only without a car for about one month and um generally speaking though we've heard that it can be two months now I mentioned for us it was a thousand Euros which included getting new plates um generally speaking I would count on 1500 Euros for a normal car we were fortunate in that our car being an Italian vehicle we had most of the original documentation of the vehicle also being the first owners and um that contained verbiage in there that was in Italian so the paperwork was familiar to the Italian authorities and there wasn't a need to translate documents that we had in our possession already there's also a certificate of Conformity that is used within Europe and that document also often is missing and then has to be requested from the manufacturer which adds another two to three hundred euros I'm not really going to go into importing vehicles from outside the European Union because there are definitely a lot more rules and regulations oftentimes you have to change headlights um obviously when you bring a vehicle from the United Kingdom you will be you know the car will be a right hand drive instead of a left-hand drive and so there's a bunch of struggles with that as well so really caution uh be careful because bringing a vehicle from the United States you may love it it will be really really difficult to get it road legal here and it will cost you an arm and a leg and probably your other arm as well the other scenario where we thought maybe we were getting scammed was when we started receiving some speeding tickets in the mail many months after supposedly we had been speeding past this this camera in Europe in almost every country the law allows the authorities to place cameras by the road they take a picture they don't have to pull you over like in the U.S to get you a speeding ticket I know in the US there are some cameras as well but over here it's the common way to to kind of catch people speeding we didn't realize there was a camera in a certain spot so then um this was before we became residents so wherever the car was was registered the the tickets arrived there we've heard examples of people in the United States as well that would get tickets six seven eight months after the infraction and unfortunately the government the the Italian law allows the police department to send you tickets up to 365 days after the infraction so it wasn't a scam we did still have to pay now there is there are three different prices on the tickets so um when you received a ticket if you pay within five days just pay the cheapest price it's not necessarily cheap but at least it's the cheaper of the three options so um don't think you're getting scammed that is exactly how it usually happens it takes the Italians a long time to be able to send your tickets funny story is we drove through Germany one time to get to here from Belgium and Germany was able to deliver the ticket because I got a ticket over there as well they were able to deliver the ticket to the address of the vehicle within five days I think so the Germans and their efficiency it's not a joke they're on it so I keep talking about residency we are working on another video where we'll talk a little bit more about how that went for us and how some of that is still ongoing actually but uh keep stay tuned for uh for another video that's coming up in the near term this was kind of a different video than we typically put out but I still hope you found this helpful it's something that many people who move here struggle with and that's why we thought let's put it out there and see if if we can help address some of the questions that people might have and bring to light some things that maybe folks aren't thinking about so my number one recommendation would be to try and learn as much for Americans especially try to pick up as much Italian as you can because sort of the time of the the time is ticking the clock is ticking in one year you will more than likely have to take a driving test a written test in order to be able to continue driving so you don't want to be limited to just living in the city center where you can walk everywhere right so make sure you've got your ducks in a row and your Italian life will be much more fulfilling well I try to cover as many scenarios as possible but if you have other things that you other questions if you have other suggestions if maybe there are other scenarios that I haven't thought about please put them in the comments and if you like this video give it a like And subscribe and tell all your friends and we'll uh we'll be happy to have them so thank you for watching and we'll see you on the next one ciao

Channel: Our Italian Destiny

Views: 8,534

Keywords: italy, umbria, car, driving in italy, living in italy, expats in italy, expat living, piegaro, fiat

Id: BFmqoFUnGq0

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023