Adventures with our Italian Car

Posted By Katy on Jun 15, 2015 | 0 comments

Google doesn’t know Tuscan roads… Like really

Google maps and Google navigate, which Matt will follow religiously almost anywhere… failed miserably a few times. My favorite instance occurred when we missed a turn and I switched from navigate to reading the map to get us back on track. Google maps showed me two roads of equal quality coming up. Both would get us back to the main road. We took the first turn. It zig zagged between medieval houses and then abruptly turned into an overgrown dirt road that went straight up the hill to meet with the main road, about 40 feet in front of us. Matt, in his determination to follow Google, gave it a try. Not a chance, in our little under-powered Fiat. We turned around hoping for better luck with the next road on the map. Turns out road number two was perfectly maintained and well used as a connector road. I’m still baffled how that first “road” even made it to Google maps.

Never let go of your Fiat keys

You pop the trunk open, toss your stuff in, and slam it closed. Then Matt says “did that just happen?!” I look at him, “are the keys in there?” I didn’t even need the answer, I knew. Yes, he popped the trunk without opening the doors, put the keys in with the rest our our stuff, then closed it, locking the keys in the car. We had a wine tasting in 15 minutes, and it was a 10 minute drive.

Now what? I’m in Italy, for goodness sake. Turns out, the Fiat Punto is an easy car to break in to. When we first arrived in Volterra, we had left the windows open just a crack, to help dry out the entire water bottle that was spilled on the floor in the back (different story). After a couple hours, it started to look like rain, so we had traipsed back to the car to put up the windows. I failed to roll up the back right window. I’ll blame getting over the stomach flu. So when we realized the keys were in the trunk, I looked at that window and said “Well, the window is open?” Lucky for us, it was a manual window. Turns out manual windows can be manually forced down just far enough for my arm to get in and open the door. Voila, car open, keys recovered, all in time to make our winery tour.

Returning the car…

When leaving the Cinque Terre parking lot, where our car had sat for two nights, we noticed for the first time a scratch on the side mirror. We knew we hadn’t put it there, but weren’t sure if it was new, or if it had been missed as a mark during car pick up. We crossed our fingers that Hertz wouldn’t notice when we returned the car later.

A few days pass, and it’s time to return our little Fiat to Florence. After about 10 minutes of VERY stressful driving, skirting around the outside of the historic city center, trying to avoid the Limited Traffic Zones (ZTL) where you get an instant ticket, we arrive in the car drop off parking garage. The Hertz lady comes to check the gas level and the exterior (drum roll). She gets to the mirror, looks up and says “Scusi, please come look.” Dang it, we’re caught. This was not on the list of previous damage, she tells us. Matt insists we didn’t do it, and the lady says she’ll have to call back to the Venice Hertz (where we picked the car up) and ask if it was on the records for the car. We are OK to wait 2 minutes for this call, just maybe we can get off the hook?

While we are negotiating, behind us a family of three is starting their Italian car adventure by practicing driving a manual in a circle around the tiny parking garage. The man, with his 6-ish year old son in the back seat, made one complete circle. However, watching it reminded me of when I was trying to learn to drive a stick in my Dad’s old VW bug at age 15 in the school parking lot… and I couldn’t find the difference between neutral and first gear a few times. This man came around to try a second circle, his wife was standing off to the side looking concerned. He couldn’t get the car to start moving again, and after about 30 seconds it actually started to smoke! Dark, stinky, burning clutch smoke. The son hops out, and walked away from the car wrinkling his nose and trying to wave away the smell of a burning clutch. The man was immediately banished from driving the car anymore. I have no idea what rental car companies do when this happens, but who rents a car that they know they can’t drive!?

Anyway, this scene is important to our situation with the scratch. The car starts to smoke the minute our Hertz lady was going to call Venice. She looks at us, looks at the situation unfolding behind us and says “I’m just going to give you the receipt and not say nothing about the spot. We have bigger problem over there.” Then we got a small lecture about how if we shouldn’t trust the paperwork to be complete when you pick up a car, and you need to check it all yourself to make sure nothing is missed. The lecture was a small price to pay for what was probably going to be a few hundred Euros of damage repair.

Our drop off receipt was printed, we scooted out of there just as fast as we could before anyone might change their mind. We were the lesser of the two problems Hertz had at that moment.