There are not many Volvos in Italy

[matthew1]

I used all the air miles I've accumulated on my Alaska Air credit card for 15 years and took my son out to Catania for a week to visit and stay with my friend Joe. It was great!

His apartment is in Aci Trezza, and we could walk to the beach and hang out in the small town.

Snorkel, eat, drink espresso, a couple local beers, wake up late, repeat.

I didn't bring a laptop or even an iPad. I didn't want to bring work with me. But I needed to be able to get into the MVS server if there was an emergency so I bought a $10 app called Prompt by a Mac/iPhone software company I trust, and that's an SSH "terminal" front end so I could tunnel into the server. I did that every day in fact to run regular maintenance-y things for fun.

Anyway, not many Volvos out there. I took some photos of what I did see.

Not many Asian brands even, not compared to North America. Lots of VW, Citroen, Renault, Opel, Mercedes, BMW, Fiat. I didn't see any Ferraris or Lamborghinis.

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[TWC]

You will find a lot more Volvos in the "rich" north of Italy especially in the mountainous regions of South Tyrol, while luxury cars and supersports are more a thing of the larger cities (despite the traffic...) and the Mafia, of course.

Keep in mind that Italy imposes a hefty luxury tax on cars with more than 2000 cc displacement, the reason why many manufacturers had or are still building engines with a lesser size. Like Volvo did on the 850 with the 2.0 for example.

[jimmy57]

I visited Bologna and some other northern Italy cities when I was there for a work project. I had a rental car and throughly enjoyed driving there. On first couple of days I had a huge issue with other drivers at major intersections. I stopped when traffic light turned red and the others would keep moving and honk and gesture at me. Then after a few seconds all traffic would stop. I figured it out. The crosswalks stayed open after the light went red. ll drivers going straight through would watch the seconds display countdown and stop when it reached 1 or 0. They knew the cross traffi did not get a green until the pedestrian's crosswalk sign stopped the peds. I asked my Italian counterpart about this and he told me, "you must remember, in Italy traffic laws are a mere suggestion"

Italy is a great place with nice people and gorgeous countryside. At least all of Northern Italy. I did not visit Rome or other southern cities.