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Socially, most Europeans seem to be taking the Sunday driving bans in a holiday spirit. "Isn't it marvelous!" exclaimed Movie Director Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet) as he drove a horse and carriage through the streets of Rome, which are generally choked by swarms of gnatlike Fiats and Moto Guzzis. "You can even hear the fountains splashing." The Piazza del Popolo, which usually resembles a dodge-'em concession at an amusement park, has been turned into a Sunday roller-skating rink. In Switzerland, the Tribune de Genève says that Genevois dining out on Sundays are even "talking to people at other tables," a rare social phenomenon among the reserved Swiss. Churches are crowded with people who cannot get out of the city by car but can bicycle to services. In the small community of Limburg, halfway between Frankfurt and Bonn, parishioners at Sunday Mass can hardly turn the pages of their prayer books without having to mumble apologies to neighbors on either side. After services, confused churchgoers wearing bicycle clamps around their cuffs anxiously search for their vehicles in a sea of look-alike bikes.
Beneath the Gemütlichkeit, however, signs of strain are showing. In The Netherlands, which has now gone through six carless Sundays, police report a dramatic rise in calls to break up fights among families forced to stay together; such duties have absorbed the energies of cops no longer needed for traffic control. In Geneva some citizens stoned cars exempt from the Sunday ban as they crossed the Pont du Mont Blanc in the center of the city and slashed the tires of autos with diplomatic license plates.
Worried by such manifestations, the Vatican has counseled Europeans to turn from "hedonism" and accept their privations "with serene public spirit and —why not?—a sense of Christian maturity." The influential Milan newspaper Corriere della Serra is worried about a potential population explosion because of the Sunday driving ban. "In a rabbit hutch of a country like Italy," it editorialized, "the austerity restrictions could bring us to a kind of Lent in the streets and carnival in bed."