Last week, Sara Piffer, a 19-year-old Italian cyclist representing the Mendelspeck team, was killed by a car while on a training ride with her brother in Trentino, northern Italy. In May of last year, Piffer had dedicated her victory in the CP Città di Corridonia race to the memory of Matteo Lorenzi, a 17-year-old cyclist who had also just been killed on a training ride.

The news is tragically familiar: in 2022 Davide Rebellin, a just-retired professional, was killed by lorry. In 2017, the former Giro d’Italia champion, Michele Scarponi, was killed. Those deaths made the news because the cyclists were famous, but many others did not. Italy has the worst cycling fatality rates in the whole of Europe, and the numbers are getting worse: there were 204 deaths in 2024, up from 197 in 2023. Piffer’s father said that Italian roads are a ‘wild west’ and another former Giro winner, Francesco Moser (who lives in the same village as the Piffer family), last week pleaded, ‘we’ve got to stop this massacre’.

When I moved back to Italy a few years ago, I made myself a promise not to be negative about the country. There’s nothing more tedious than an expat enjoying the privileges of an adoptive country but continuously moaning about it. On the whole, I’ve kept my promise, but when it comes to Italian drivers, I just can’t. In 2023, Italy had over 3,094 road deaths, 15 per cent above the EU per capita average. According to the news channel, SkyTG24, in the first half of 2023, the country saw an average of 437 road accidents per day. That year the country had 52.4 road deaths per million inhabitants compared to, say, the UK with 25.1 or Spain with 37.

It’s not just jaundiced foreigners like me who are despairing of Italian drivers: in a 2022 survey conducted by France’s Vinci Autoroutes, only 16 per cent of Italians said that their fellow Italians were civil behind the wheel. A previous survey by the same organisation revealed that Italians think 45 per cent of their compatriots are irresponsible, that 37 per cent are stressed, 26 per cent are aggressive and 34 per cent dangerous. In a 2023 survey conducted on behalf of insurance websites, 35 per cent of men admitted breaking the speed limit, and 34 per cent of the 35-44 age group admitted using their phones while driving. The driver of the lorry that killed Scarponi confessed that he had been watching a video on his phone at the time of the accident.

All those stats are confirmed by personal experience. A few years ago, my nine-year-old son was cycling alone to school when a car knocked him over. The driver wound down the window, shouted ‘you OK?’ and drove off. A few months later, wearing a hi-viz jacket and with front-and-back bike lights, I too got knocked down as a car sped onto the roundabout without giving way. ‘I didn’t see you’, said the driver as I picked up my broken glasses.

When you get a bus, it’s usual to see the driver sending text messages or watching reels of football highlights. If traffic lights are red, the majority of drivers around you will be looking at their phones. Tailgating on motorways and dual-carriageways is pathological: speeding cars will come up behind you and flash their lights only a few metres from your back bumper.

Most telling, for me, is the fact that indicators are rarely used. Although there’s obviously a degree of self-interest in the use of that flashing amber light (no-one wants a collision), using an indicator is almost entirely a courtesy to others on the road, akin to saying ‘excuse me’. The fact that it is so rarely seen on Italian roads suggests, I’m sorry, extraordinary incivility.

In some ways, I understand it. Even more than America, Italy has always seen the car as a symbol of freedom and glamour. The internal combustion engine was, in part, invented by Italians (Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci) in the mid-19th -entury. The automobile industry represents a vital slice of Italian GDP (around 5.2 per cent), with a turnover of €93 billion, employing almost quarter of a million people.

The closest thing Italy has to a monarchy is the Agnelli family, founders of FIAT and now 14 per cent owners of the world’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer, Stellantis. Italian engineering and design are so exemplary that the list of iconic car – and motorbike – manufacturers is very long: Lamborghini, Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Piaggio, Vespa, Aprilia, Ducati and so on.

The result is that the car, in Italy, has become a fetishistic object, something anthropomorphised and salivated over. ‘Cars are like women’, Enzo Ferrari – the much-eulogised founder of Ferrari – once said: ‘you need to know how to touch them in their most sensitive places.’

Cars, of course, really are very sensitive: an extra centimetre on the accelerator, or a few degrees on the steering wheel, can be a matter of life or death when you’re not encased in an air-bagged metal box. And it’s not just cyclists getting mown down. In 2024, 475 pedestrians were killed by Italian drivers.

Despite this ongoing carnage, it’s commonplace for politicians to demonise any road-users that aren’t red-meat drivers. Vittorio Feltri, a geriatric TV personality and now a member of Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party sitting on Milan’s City Council, said last autumn: ‘I only like cyclists when they get run over.’

They very often do. One of the more melancholic sites on Italian roads are all the ‘ghost bikes’. Looking like two-dimensional skeletons, they remind you of yet another fatality. Milan now has its own annual ‘ride of silence’, commemorating dead cyclists. None of it makes any difference. The best-case scenario for cyclists in Italy is that you’ll be incessantly honked. At worst, you’re taking your life not in your own hands, but putting it in the hands of aggressive bargers who are wilfully blind. ‘I didn’t’, they always say, ‘see you.’