Getting my Italian driver's license: A saga for our times

I thought it might be useful (fun?) to write up my months-long experience getting a driver’s license as an American in Italy, so here it is.

Overall it was an interesting mix of the kind of bureaucratic complexity Italy is famous for and a technological modernity that it most definitely is not.

I should start by noting that I’ve been living full-time in Italy for three years now. I have a “permit to stay”, as the common stilted translation of permesso di soggiorno has it, and the required identity card (carta d’identità) and health-system card (tessera sanitaria). Legally you’re required to get an Italian license after a year in the country in order to drive. As an American, you can’t just exchange your US state license for an Italian one, the way people from other European countries can. This is not a crazy idea, as the whole system of traffic signs, to take an obvious example, is very different. That said, you’d hope that you could do just the written exam, especially after 40 years of driving, but no such luck.

The bureaucracy in outline

Here are the basic steps you have to go through to get the license:

1. Get a note from your doctor (certificato anamnestico)
2. Get a note from another, “legal” doctor (idoneità psicofisica)
3. Make an appointment for the written (“theory”) test
4. Take the test (and pass)
5. Go back and pick up your permit
6. Take at least 6 hours of lessons
7. Take the driving test (and pass)

I should say first that Rome’s equivalent of the DMV, the Motorization office (OK, Motorizzazione Civile di Roma, but I like the anglicized version), has a nice on-line page, with all sorts of info about the process. I needed to brush up on my bureaucratic Italian, but the site is really very helpful. About the only thing that’s not so clear is the work hours of their office…as I found out the hard way one recent Tuesday (which is not a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday).

The doctors’ notes

The first step is fairly simple. You go to your family doctor (medico di base) and get an attestation that you’re in decent physical shape. This was the easiest step and cost me €15. I just dropped by the day after I called to confirm (May 2). You then take that note off with you to make your appointment with a state-approved doctor (medico legale). Here’s the first bit of bureaucracy. In Rome, at least, you can’t just call and make this appointment on your own, which I found out when trying to do so. You have to go to your local state-healthcare-system office, the Azienda Sanitaria Locale, commonly called ASL (“AH-zul”—for a people whose language has a lot of euphony, Italians love to word-ify even their most awkward acronyms). This is the same place you go to for your healthcare card and various other things. It’s not typically a quick visit, but this one was a pleasant surprise for me. A short wait and a brief chat with the nice woman at the window, and I have my appointment for the medico legale (whose office is conveniently near my apartment) in about a week’s time (May 28). That visit was also fairly simple. They checked my vision, took my vitals, and asked some questions. All done. €16.34 (really €16 plus fee), which I paid on-line beforehand. They give you a stamped form that says you’ve had the exam, are fit (i.e., have the idoneità psicofisica to drive), and that you’re in the system. You now have three or six months to sign up for the written exam, depending on what kind of doctor you went to.

The payment system is one of those areas where Italy has fully embraced the on-line world. Instead of the old method will all its Byzantine stamps and special paper, you just go on-line to the weirdly named pagoPA service, find the form you need to pay for, give them your payment info, and receive the receipt via email. Print that out for the visit and you’re set.

Getting a permit

The title here reflects the American jargon. In Italy there are two tests, one of theory (the written) and one of practice (the actual driving). After you pass the theory test, they give you a piece of pink paper that verifies that. It is called, in all directness, the “pink sheet” (foglio rosa). This lets you drive with an experienced driver (like an instructor) with you in the car, as long as, among other things, you have a big “P” on your back window and a littler one on the front or the car is clearly labeled as belonging to a driving school.

With a couple of passport-size photos and the proper paperwork, including two more fees that total €42.74, you can now get your appointment to take the written exam. Once again, you have to do this in person, now at the Motorizzazione, despite paying on-line and having your medical approval in the system. They have two locations in Rome, one at the northern end of the city and one at the southern. Based on travel time via public transportation, I went to the southern (Laurentina), a little over an hour from my apartment, in the week following my last doctor’s appointment (June 6). I had to wait about 20 minutes or so outside, after being directed by one of the employees (who also gave me the correct terminology: I needed to “sign up” - iscrivermi), and then another five or ten minutes inside when space cleared up there. The guy at the window who set me up was very nice, commiserating with the plight of a driver of 40 years needing to go through this whole process. I was out of there in about 5 minutes with the proper paperwork, which is the same form that you filled out and brought with you. They attach your photo to it, stamp (of course) and sign it, and finish it off with a sticker. Check the website for the schedule, as they’re not open every day and they don’t process applications the whole day when they are. (As of this writing, they’re open MWF 9-13, but stop taking people at 12.)

At this point, I hit another bit of odd bureaucracy: despite the return of my form, I didn’t actually have an appointment to take the written exam yet. For that I had to wait 25 days and then send an email to ask for one. The email needs to have a particular format and contain certain information that’s on your paperwork. All of that is conveniently listed on a sheet taped next to the window where I did the paperwork, so I just took a photo of it with my phone, like other people were doing. (The info is also on-line, to be fair.) I’m not sure what the 25-day delay is for, but there it is. Promptly on June 30 (technically the 25th day from my appointment) I wrote the required email. Immediately I received back an acknowledgement email, followed three days later (July 3) by the email with my appointment, which was for the end of the month (July 30). That email included a PDF listing my appointment, which I printed out, just to be safe.

Taking the written exam

At this point, I should say something about the exam itself and my prep for it.

The exam format is simple: 30 true/false questions of which you need to get at least 27 correct, so no more than three errors or 10%. You can find the driver’s manual and the questions on line, and there are also several sites and apps that provide them to you and will give you quizzes and track your progress. That’s very convenient and I availed myself of one of the apps to do my prep. The not-so-simple part is that there are over 7,000 questions and they range in difficulty from the very simple and straightforward (“You have to watch out for children at the crosswalk because they will often not be paying attention”) to the very tricky where they’ll say, for example, that something is recommended when it’s obligatory, or ask you a detail about the vehicle restrictions on one of the four classes of motorcycle licenses (the same theory exam is required for motorcycle and car licenses). On top of that, of course, there’s the language barrier; unsurprisingly a lot of the technical driving vocabulary was not covered by my language classes in school and is also not something that comes up in daily life…or it does, but it’s referred to with informal vocabulary (e.g., girare instead of svoltare for “turn”).

Partly to prepare for this aspect of it and also partly to make sure I actually got going on this, I signed up for a language class that went over the major topics of the manual in Italy, teaching the vocabulary (and frankly a lot of the content). That was twice a week for six weeks in Jan/Feb. This was helpful and—though I surely could have done it myself—it did force me to go through the material, so mission accomplished.

Mission accomplished
(U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Juan E. Diaz. (RELEASED), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m not saying I was ready after the six weeks ended. Oh, no. I was consistently getting more than three wrong on the practice tests. So I bit the bullet and started going through each section of the manual with all the associated questions. I also quizzed myself with the app at the end of each section, and continually on the sections I had already completed. I got to where I was dedicating a lot of time to this, especially once I got my appointment: twice a day for up to an hour each time. Overall that took a few months. By the time the exam rolled around, I had finished the manual and was working my way through the 7,000+ questions (I got about 80% done). Obviously there’s a lot of luck involved in which questions you draw, but I was now consistently making no more than one mistake per effort.

High-Tech Exam

So off to the Motorizzazione for the exam. The building is one of those classic 1960-70s-era Italian bureaucratic building on the outskirts of the city. Very ugly, minimally functional. Windows open for ventilation in summer. (It was fairly warm, but not sweltering, so I’m not sure they don’t reach a point where they turn on the AC. I suspect not.) I got there fairly early and waited with a few dozen other people, mostly a mix of older teens, adult immigrants, and a smattering of parents and driving-school personnel (you can do the prep and foglio rosa process with them). Round about the time of the exam, someone comes in with a clipboard, tells you what room the exam will be in and which group they’re calling by start-time. Your invitation includes both bits of information, so, as long as you hear what they say, you know to pay attention. We file out into the hallway, one by one, and once we’re all assembled (18 of us?), we go to the exam room.

This was actually pretty slick. The room we used (and I think the others as well) has windows for pretty much the full height of its external walls. There were 50 or more small tables (desks), mostly arranged in twos, with flat, touch-screen computers on each, facing opposite directions. A couple of employees were there, one of whom gave directions. When we walked in, we had to leave our bags in the back and then were assigned to a desk and told to put any personal items into a velcro-sealed bag. Then we went to the desks and computers. The first thing we did was click through a privacy-consent screen. Now the fun part: the computers used facial recognition to identify each of us. We were told that the computers would constantly do this, so if there came a time during the exam that the computer locked us out, we were just to wait until the computer redid the scan which would take a few seconds. (I could see a little warning text pop up on the left on my screen during the exam, but I was never impacted by it.)

At this point one of the employees came by with one of those scanning wands and scanned every one of us individually. The scanner was fairly sensitive. I had to put some cash from my pocket into the velcro bag. It took a good 10 minutes to go through everyone. Frankly it was tighter security than at the airport. Coupled with the facial recognition, this suggested to me that they’re pretty concerned about cheating. But once that was done, we finally got the directions on taking the exam.

It’s basically the same format as on-line, though the layout is a little different. On the left is your info (where the warning pops up), but most of the screen is taken up with the question area. There are buttons for “true” and “false”, and arrows on each side at the bottom for “forward” and “backward”. (You could see the smudges on the screen where the buttons were.) You can skip questions, answer them, move back and forth through them. It was all very responsive. When you’re done, you can review the whole exam as a list with the question and your answer. From that screen, too, you can go back and change any answer. When you’re satisfied, you submit the exam and then you can leave the room.

To put it nicely, the administrators seem pretty confident that you won’t have any trouble doing the exam. There’s the little issue of the facial recognition locking you out, even if briefly (and one or two people had issues with that), but there was also another little interruption when they brought in an entirely new group of people to take the exam in the half of the room that my group wasn’t using. This was five or ten minutes into the actual exam time, and they got the same introduction that we did. So not exactly ideal test-taking conditions.

In order to get our results, we were told to go on-line to the website, log in, and request them. They were then sent via email in a little under an hour. The results weren’t available until shortly after noon for our 9:30 appointment (10:00 start, in the end). That seems to be new as a friend who took the exam earlier in the summer had the experience of the personnel reading out everyone’s results by name and score; no FERPA worries here.

A chat with another test-taker revealed that we did not at all have the same questions, so I imagine that they are randomly chosen at the time of the exam. Another anti-cheating tactic, I guess.

And I passed, so on to the next phase…

Lessons

At this point there are obligatory driving lessons with a driving school. Technically you need two hours of driving in three different scenarios: night-time, highway, and urban.

The first thing the school does is transfer the foglio rosa from the motorizzazione to themselves (cambio codice). There’s a fee for that; mine was €65. The next day they signed me up for the test in the following month (October), for €110. Then I started the lessons. For someone with 43 years of driving experience, it was all about learning the things you need to do and not do to pass the exam. There are some minor differences between the Italian and American systems, mainly related to when you turn your head to look at the blind spot (less in Italy, at least as I remember learning to drive in the US). But mostly the process is like in the US: you learn a bunch of things that you’re inevitably going to stop doing (or, in my case, immediately stop doing).

I lost some time at this point because I passed the theory exam right at the end of July, so when I went to a few local driving schools to get details, they were about to shut down for Ferragosto. This meant I wouldn’t start lessons until September, which meant I wouldn’t take the exam until October. I started the lessons pretty early in the month (the 11th), but as the October exam date (the 15th) approached, I slowed down, so that I would have more lessons closer to the exam since it was less about learning to drive and more about learning to drive as I was expected to and I wanted the time to get things well fixed in my head and muscle memory. The school was great. I took the lessons exactly where they did the exam, so all the streets became familiar. The instructors also understood the mission for someone in my situation. In the end I did more lessons than strictly necessary (at €30 a pop), but that was my choice and it was helpful.

As for the exam itself, there are theoretically three parts. The first is an oral exam on some of the theory that’s more directly relevant to actual driving. For example, what do the lights on the dashboard mean, or what are the exceptions to the standard rules for new drivers (e.g., lowered speed limits on highways). That seems a little much to me, given the intensity of the theory exam, but there it is. The second part is actual driving, specifically doing three maneuvers: a three-point turn, parallel parking, and driving in reverse for a bit in a straight line. Finally there’s just driving around, yielding when you’re supposed to, not getting into accidents, etc, etc. During the exam, your instructor sits in the passenger seat just like during lessons and the test inspector is in the back, not at all like my US experience. The instructor tells you what to do and the instructor is there presumably to slam on the extra brakes if you do something stupid. Keep in mind that you’ve been learning to drive on the same streets where you take the exam, and the maneuvers are mostly done in the same spots. They’re fairly generous and have you do the maneuvers in places with room to spare (again not like my teenage test). For example, you do a three-point turn where there’s a garage across the street and you parallel park behind a car with a lot of space behind it, perhaps in front of another garage.

In my case, let’s just say that the inspector was very sympathetic to my situation and the exam was over expeditiously. A couple of hours later, I picked up my new license from the driving school. I wasn’t sure how the timing worked, but it looks like they set the expiration date on your birthday in the expiration year (five years in the future, given my advanced age, versus ten for the younger crowd).

Ta-Da!

Down to brass tacks, the whole thing cost me about €550, mostly in lessons, and took five and a half months from my official start with the doctor’s visit (though if you add in the preliminary class and personal exam prep, it was more like ten months). You can probably cut out the Ferragosto-related delay of a month to get it down to four months, unless you’re as unlucky as I was in the timing.

And that’s it! I am now the happy possessor of an Italian driver’s license, complete with obligatory bad picture.