We just returned from our trip and I thought I would share my experiences with the Garmin 275 GPS I bought for the trip. The GPS performed very well in navigating in Italy while we were driving. For walking, it (and I suspect ALL gps's) is not as useful. The buildings in cities are so close that there is not enough sky for the GPS to get a fix. You end up navigating from Piazza to Piazza, where you have enough sky to get a fix. The built in data base was not very useful for restaurants, hotels, etc. Gas stations were there, and that was helpful. You will want to know how to change your unit from "Track Up" mode to "North Up" mode. When you are driving a twisty road in the hills of Tuscany the "Track Up" mode makes the map spin like a kaliedoscope and it will make you car sick. We had one person driving and another navigating. In driving about 30 km on a country thoroughfare the voice prompts kept saying to turn onto "a county road" in italian. When you're on a road that passes through small towns the name of the road changes all the time, and each time it changes the GPS tells you to turn left or right onto the "new" road. We ended up turning off the voice prompts until we got onto the highway. Take a cheap compass and the unit is more useful in cities. That also goes for a map. Ask questions if you like...
Posted by
Los Angeles
1825 posts
Ted,
I only used my Garmin in France but had a similar experience as you. Walking in cities I was better off with a compass and map but when driving it was great. I can't imagine why someone would want to drive there without one. Had I had to navigate with maps while my wife drove (she get's carsick trying to read a map) I'm sure my trip would have had a completely different dynamic. We drove some one lane cow roads in the countryside and never worried about getting lost.
Posted by
Florida, USA
12172 posts
... and France is nothing compared to Italy. I had driven all over without a GPS. After our first foray into Italy, however, I bought a GPS right away. We now use it for any unfamiliar driving. We started with one TomTom. When that died we replaced it with two more TomToms (one for each car but only one with European maps to take on trips).
Posted by
OP
Caruthers, CA, USA
244 posts
We use a Droid and it has navigation via Google Maps when we are in the US. That solution requires a good data connection to work, so it can have it's hiccups. The cost of a data plan in Italy was one of the reasons we bought the GPS for the trip. It is very nice to have the unit tell you when a turn is coming up, etc. A couple of times the unit got "confused" about it's position, both times when I turned it on after we were already driving. It ended up thinking it was a few hundred yards left or right of the road we were actually on. Kept telling us to turn left to join the road. Turning the unit off and back on fixed it. If you can turn the GPS on and let it get woken up before you start driving, that is best.
Posted by
Gaston, Oregon, USA
931 posts
We have used our TOMTOM to drive in Germany, Portugal, France, Italy, Sardinia, and last month Spain. We would not leave home without it. It does not like tall buildings, but has no problems navigating country roads with name changes, and everything else. Sometimes it does better finding an address if you input the cross streets. We really like the visula and audio warnings when you are comming up on a fixed radar unit; that has saved us lots of $$$$$. The GPS name pronunciations are hilarious. We learned not to drive in any country without a local Michelin road map (of the country) , and a compass. The bigest failing that we have seen, is the out-of-date databases that do not show "new"? roads. (and we d out GPS last year) We were warned about the "absence" of the East-West freeways in Spain. We had to navigate from one town to the next (use the map, and then navigate town-by-town when your data base is out of date; it works great!)