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ItwasearlySundayevening,theareawasaruralindustrialzoneandeverythingwasclosed.
Therewasnoonetoask.Afterdrivingabouttenminutesalongtheexitroadwehadchosen,
we began to get ever deeper into the rural countryside and realized this definitely wasn't it.
Back to the traffic circle. Another exit, another ten-minute experiment that led to nowhere
thatwewantedtogo.Wewerenowgettinglowongaswhilestarringinalowbudgethorror
film called Escape from Rimini . An hour later on our fourth or fifth try we finally hit upon
a traffic circle that listed our highway! Shortly afterwards there was even a gas station, a
fancy affair with snack bar and deli that actually stayed open on a Sunday evening. We
pulled in, filled upouralmost emptied tank, and confirmed that we were headed in the right
direction. I mentioned to the cashier that I had been having a hard time finding signs for
E45. He told us that if we didn't see any for E45 just to follow signs for State Highway
3. Highway E45, you see, was the new name they assigned to SS3 a few years ago. They
haven't changed all the signs, but there's really no point. After all, everyone knows they're
the same road. (Almost everyone.)
The next time you're in Tuscany and feel up for a challenge, try driving from downtown
Florence to Siena by following the signs. (We eventually learned how to do it, so now we
can ignore the signs like everyone else.) But our first couple of attempts were hilarious. It
remindedmeofplayingZork,thepartwhenyou'retryingtofindyourwaythroughthecav-
erns. (Zork, in case you arrived on the scene late, was one of the earliest interactive adven-
ture games for personal computers, circa 1983.) What made playing Escape from Florence
especially entertaining were the intersections where multiple signs for Siena pointed in dif-
ferent directions. Such a cool idea! As you make your choices from the possible options,
you find yourself passing a second time or third time through the same piazza, but coming
at it from a new direction each time. It's a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon and really
get to know the city of Florence.
If I ruled the land of Italy, I would invite a few hundred foreign students to spend a summer
driving the length and breath of the land. I would pay a base salary plus a bonus for every
instance they could find of anomalies in the signage system, every lacunae, every blank
line of instructions, every occurrence of two signs that name the same destination but point
in opposite directions. After a summer the whole system would be debugged and anyone
could find his or her way anywhere.
If it ever happens, you read it here first. But it's unlikely to happen since the need for such
an intervention would be a hard sell. After all, everybody already knows where Chiusdino
is and how to get there, so what's the point?
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