Florence Asking the way in Italy

Asking the way in Italy is easy. They have a very simple word for asking the way and you simply say the name of the place after it. It can be difficult to understand the answer. But it’s not just because of the language. That’s why I thought it wise to warn people of the dangers of asking the way in Italy.

Most Italians are very friendly. They want to help you and they are almost mortified if they cannot. So, if you stop in the country and ask a local the way, he or she will be only too happy to have a short chat and afterwards give you very explicit instructions on where to go.

The problem here is that they really want to please you. You may in fact wave a happy farewell and drive off in completely the wrong direction.

By giving you what the local genuinely believes might be the way, you are happy. An “I don’t know” response causes unhappiness and that is completely undesirable for an Italian..

How do you deal with this? I would advise counting the number of seconds before your local’s eyes light up and you are given the directions. You must make your own decision about how long you allow as it depends on the season or whether there’s a thinderstorm in the offing. The longer the time, the more the directions are likely to be fiction.

The second point to bear in mind is to say the name of your objective correctly. I remember spending all day many years ago asking the way the San Stephano but stressing the second syllable. Nobody knew where it was until somebody realised the problem. “Ah, it’s San stephano you want, stressing the first syllable?” Dumbly we nodded.

This is probably not going to happen when you ask the way to Orsanmichelle in Florence as there are too many tourists around to ever hear it pronounced correctly Florentine style. We would probably sound the  semi-hard “ch” on the fourth syllable but the Florentines sound the hard “h” for some curious reason. So they say something like ” Oar-san-me-hay-ley” for the church name which literally means St Michael of the Vegetable Patch.

Did you or Dan Brown know that there was a Templar church in Florence? Put up in 1406, it became a Knights of St John church about half a century later. You’ll never find the way to that as the only sign on the front says, “Do not lean your bicycles here”

A disturbing trend these days is a conscious reaction to the constant bombardment of tourists on information places. You go into a place selling hotel rooms and ask where the bus station is. The answer will be something like, “Go out the door and turn right!” You follow the directions and there’s nothing there. What the person is actually saying very politely is , “Go away!” You can normally recognise this sort of reaction by the grim face which accompanies the direction.

More easily recognised is the reaction I had last week when I asked if a certain bus ran from the stop outside the ticket office in which I was standing. I wasn’t buying a ticket so the lady simply said “I don’t know”. At this stage it is advisable to retreat but I said, “You don’t want to tell me?” She answered with a firm, “No!!” No difficulty in interpreting that answer!!!

This brings me to a journey I had to make out to a trading estate to buy a minor piece of electronic equipment. The place was in the same estate as IKEA so that was a great help as everybody knows where IKEA is.

First I thought I could save time and money by taking the free IKEA bus. After waiting for a bit I assumed that, being Italy, it had simply stopped running, (Actually when I arrived at IKEA later, there was a sign saying just that! It would have been more helpful if the sign had been in the place from where the bus normally departs!!)

I established that I needed a number 29 bus. I bought a couple of tickets (they all cost the same in the town) and asked where the 29 went from. “Over there” was my answer pointing to the Santa Maria Novella railway station. I searched the areas to which he had pointed and didn’t find the 29. So I returned and said it wasn’t there.

“La Scala!” he shouted. So I walked through the station to the stairs on the other side and searched every bus stop in the vicinity. By now, I had wasted SO much time that I was determined to find this 29 bus.

Then I spied a hut in front of the caribiniere palace about a hundred metres away. As I approached, I saw with delight that it was a bus company hut. In it a man was very busily reading the newspaper. “Numero 29?”, I yelled through the closed window. “A sinistra!” (On the left!), he yelled back without opening the window. “There is no “sinistra’ on this road”, I shouted. “It only goes right! Do you mean right then left?” He obviously thought I was stupid but he nodded and went back to studying his newspaper.

Walking back to the stairs and then turning left, I saw the bus stop. Immediately along came a number 30A bus. Stupidly, I asked the driver if he went to IKEA. He thought for a bit and said, “OK”. Now this,from all my direction-finding experience should have been enough to warn me off this bus. But I jumped on.

Eventually we approached the airport where I knew IKEA was. I asked the driver if IKEA was here and he instructed me “Retondo destra!” And sure enough, after walking to the roundabout, I could see the IKEA sign on my right about a kilometre away.

I rewarded myself with a 70 cent hot dog in a deserted IKEA then bought my stuff from the shop next door.

You can get an awfully long way with just “Dove”, then listening for “a sinistra” or “destra”.Then even bus riding can be an adventure if you can find the bus!!