Driven mad

Buried away in the little French guide book to Sicily was a coded health warning of a type the people of France will seldom see. Although couched in unsensational terms, it offered cautionary thoughts on the standard of driving they could expect to encounter.

Derided all over Europe for their cavalier approach to safety, courtesy and basic consideration on the road, French drivers - or, at least, those planning a trip to Sicily - suddenly discovered they were about to meet their match.

Sicilians drove "relatively fast", the book said, and traffic in the big cities, Palermo and Catania, was chaotic and to be avoided if at all possible. And while islanders were generally "calmer" than mainland Italians, the roads were in any case full of the latter, especially in the holiday season.

There were always those on my old blog who championed France's innocence in these matters.

The French themselves, of course, will never see themselves as bad or inherently dangerous drivers.

They simply failed to understand when that mock chart of the EU produced a composite European from the then 12 members by highlighting each country's stereotypical sins.

They got the rest of it: the bits about the model Mr European being as available as the Belgians, "sober like the Irish", as modest as the Spanish and as good at cooking as the English. It was just the "driving like the French" jibe that left them hurt and perplexed.

I would hazard a guess that most outsiders, along with a few of France's own road safety people, do see the the French as aggressive, ill-tempered and inconsiderate when behind the wheels of their cars.

But a week in Sicily - an otherwise delightful retreat where Salut!, or rather the internet cafe giving me access to it, was a cable car ride away - persuaded me that they are angels when compared with their neighbours to the south-east.

It is a long time since I drove in mainland Italy, but if Sicily, out of high holiday season, is "calmer", then I hope it will an even longer time before I do so again.

Sicilians can not really be blamed for the choked city streets. Motorway links are good but whatever the size of town or village, the road system is just not up the the demands placed upon it.

Their demeanour on the open road is another matter. Tailgating is only marginally worse than on the autoroute and routes nationales of France, but there are chilling variations in the approach to, and execution of, overtaking.

Cars, van and lorries of all sizes will suddenly dart out from a line of near stationary traffic, sweep across the double white lines and gain a few vehicle lengths before barging back in.

If the French do not so much drive on the left or right but in the middle, the Sicilians - or is it their mainland visitors? - believe in using the entire roadway.

Take the fondness for lane sharing. The overtaking driver does not wait to complete the manoeuvre before cutting back into the inside lane perilously close to the offside of the vehicle being passed.

And when, indicating left, I was stalled by a woman blocking the way into my hotel to take or make a mobile phone call, a stream of impatient drivers pulled out to get past even after she had moved on. Oh, and everyone except her seems to use their mobiles without bothering to stop whether or not they have hands free sets.

The upshot is that every other car on the island seems to have sizeable bumps and scratches. Perhaps with the success of Italian magistrates against the mafia, machismo on the road has become an outlet for all that excess testosterone.

I have experienced pretty scary driving in other corners of the world. There was the religious fanatic whose idea of a short cut was to drive a few hundred yards the wrong way down a dual carriageway flyover in Peshawar. And I have sat frozen in the seats of speeding, falling-apart taxis in several parts of Africa and the Middle East.

But Sicily was, in European terms, special enough to make my French wife wonder if anyone took driving tests there, and to remind me of the comment left on my old blog by Lise Norris.

Lise was talking about driving in the French and Italian capitals, both of which were familiar to her, but perhaps her theory can be applied more widely.

The difference, she said, was "that the French know the highway code and choose to ignore it whereas the Italians don't know it exists".