More than 2,000 years ago, Roman trafficthe noise and tangle of horses, carriages, pedestrians, lurching palanquins so beset Julius Caesar that he angrily decreed that no loaded wagons could pass through the city by daylight. In these same unwidened streets, 250,000 cars, buses, motorcycles, Vespas and Lambrettas now beset lesser men than Caesar. Untrammeled by any of the usual conventions of the motorized world, Italians mount their vehicles like men possessed and ride off to bellowing, bumper-to-bumper battle.
For in Italy the law of the road has been the law of the jungle....