Italy, 2024, and some things never change. Again. The Italian Ministry of Transport has produced a Public Service Announcement video meant to spread the gospel of road safety to the younger generation. The, er, cool video showing young people hanging out in cars is meant to be shared across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other places where the wide-eyed, smartphone-addicted youth are known to frequent.
The message is straightforward: be very careful about the use of your phones in cars, and if you are on the move, don't use or look at them at all. In the 30 seconds of video we see two realities: on one side of the screen the girl behind the wheel gets distracted by looking at her friend's phone and the car crashes; on the other side she decides not to fall into temptation and the evening goes as it should. Simple, clear...cool.
Except for one detail: in two of the three advertisements produced, neither the driver nor the passengers have their seatbelts on. What a way to stay safe, kids!
The jokes and memes that followed across Italy, a nation known for its healthy sense of auto-irony, were boundless. They are also part of a long tradition of taking the rules of the road for an eternal ride...
Rules and the law of the jungle
Before going any further, try to picture the dream: driving a Vespa at sunset across a Sicilian backroad, or a convertible with your hair in the wind through the hills of Tuscany. Birds chirping, the fragrance of lemons in the air and the horns sounds all around you. Literally everywhere. Because you are actually stuck in traffic and that's what Italians do when you're stuck in traffic.
The drivers of my native land are considered famously fast and crazy, even though they're not truly aggressive. The use of horns, for instance, offers an interesting nuance, because it doesn't just represent impatience, but if pressed slightly can communicate "on your left/right!" or "here I come, around a blind corner" — a whole vocabulary itself.
When behind the wheel, you need to be confident, decisive.
One thing for sure is that rules don't really apply, at least the ones about anything considered "proper" driver behavior. Still, be careful, parking and speeding fines are very much a consistent source of government revenue — it's just that you're never sure when the rules are activated.
One law that is eternal is the one of the jungle: who enters traffic first, the one who parks quicker and better than you, even though you were there first — yes this law is eternal in Italy. So when behind the wheel, you need to be confident, decisive, otherwise your hesitation will be seen as weakness, and cars will just go around you, and leave you frozen, shut out of circulation.
Buckle upish
And so, back to the question of seatbelts. Here, we have a bit of a national divide: in the north, where I'm from, we have mostly come around to obeying the national seatbelt law, which requires buckling up in both the front and back seats. In southern Italy, well, not so much...
Famously, soon after seatbelts were made obligatory, t-shirts were being sold in the southern city of Naples that featured a photo of a seatbelt strap across the front. More recently for newer car models, you can also buy the final part of the seatbelt, the one that locks in place, to cut the beeping if you don't buckle in, to avoid having the strap across your chest.
But what were they thinking in the latest advertisement? Was it shot somewhere down in the deep south? I guess there will now need to be a fourth spot to remind the Ministry of Transport not to forget seatbelts in the next stunt to attract the attention of young people.
For now, let's focus on the message that matters: drive safely, do not drink and drive, don't text and drive, don't shoot videos and drive — just focus on the road ahead, as we say in Italy: “You watch your front and let everyone else watch your back.” And do wear your seatbelts, no matter what you may have seen on TikTok. Wait, stop looking at your phone!