more toll road/driving questions for Italy

Why not just use the gps on your phone? You have time to practice at home and get accustomed to it. That being said, don’t be surprised if it, or one in a car for that matter, leads you astray. Especially in Italy, we have had gps directions that could not have been correct. Have a good map for backup. One other point about gps directions is that in Italy, many roads (most?) don’t have numbers clearly displayed. There may be markers after you actually turn on to them. Don’t drive along waiting to see a sign with a highway number.

Thanks Rosalyn. I'll plan to do both. South of Salerno looks easy or at least straight forward directions. It's getting out of Naples that worries me. Do you have any idea about the toll roads? Or one route vs the other?

We rented a car with gps for three weeks. The person at the rental counter told us to get the car, then stop at the attendant “downstairs” for help with the gps. We drove “downstairs” and next thing you know we’re leaving the parking structure - no attendant around and gps is in German. Made for an interesting first day! I googled changing the language, but found nothing. From then on, we used google maps on my phone in conjunction with the car gps. I downloaded all the maps so we could use them offline. We’d plug in our destination into both systems, have the visual map for the driver and verbal directions in English.

Your understanding of the tolls is correct. Make sure you keep lots of change, it makes it easier.

I can’t comment on your choice of routes so you might want to plug your trip into Via Michelin and see what suggestions it offers. It will also tell you the cost of tolls and estimated fuel cost for each one. Here’s a link to Via Michelin. I don’t think that weekend traffic would necessarily be heavier since there is a lot less commercial traffic.

I just completed my 10th trip to Italy in October. I retired my GPS 7 years ago and rely on either Waze (part of the Google family) or Google Maps for driving directions. If you’re not going to have a local SIM card for your phone, Maps is the app to use since you can download maps of the area you need and use it offline. I prefer Waze since it gives you traffic info - speed limit (not well posted in Italy where you’re expected to know the type of road and lawful speed), accidents, road hazards, police presence, traffic cams, traffic tutors, etc.

If your phone is unlocked, consider getting the €30 TIM Visitor SIM card. I am not a fan of paper maps. The routing apps keep improving. I’ve used them in cities (Padova, Verona, Torino, Napoli, Roma) and the rural areas of the Piedmont, Dolomites, Sardinia and Corsica and never got bad directions. I do look at the routes on my iPad the night before to get an overview of the trip.

Be wary about Hertz and GPS. My experience with them has been that whenever a vehicle is equipped with gps that uses an SD card to hold the map data they will remove the card and try and charge the cost of a standalone gps rental (very expensive) to replace it. This is a cynical and deceitful practice as there isno additional cost incurred by them by the purchasing of a seperate gps unit as it comes as standard with the car. Some vehicles have the maps built in, some (a lot of Audi models) use an SD card. This has happened with Hertz (and only Hertz) in Europe and the US so it's not a confined practice.

Be prepared to use your phone, we have done on many occasions and it works fine.

Thanks for the heads up JC. Between my phone and SIL’s phone I think we’ll have it covered.

After hearing travelers speak of "google maps offline", we finally tried it on our driving trip through France in September and it worked perfectly !

At night at your hotel/b&b when you have wifi, go to your google maps app, click the lines on the top left, click offline maps, and download the map area that you will need the next day. Depending on your range of driving, the download may take a while.

The next day, voila ! We could drive, have no data or wifi, and my phone gave me directions exactly like it does when I have data turned on in the states !

We still watched road signs, but I can't believe we never tried this before !

We left our GPS with Europe maps home this past fall and used Google maps, much better and up to date!
The rental car also had GPS but was very difficult to program, clicking on each letter needed so we ignored it.