Australia and Italy sit on opposite sides of almost everything that matters behind the wheel — which side of the road, which side of the car, and which streets a visitor is actually allowed to drive down at all. Chauffeured transport through Drivision's overseas partner network exists for exactly that gap.
Italy draws more first-time visitors through Drivision's overseas network than almost any other European destination — the Colosseum and the Vatican, the Amalfi Coast's cliffside towns, Venice's canals, the vineyards of Tuscany. It's also one of the few countries where the driving itself, rather than the destination, is the thing most likely to go wrong for a visiting Australian. Through our overseas partner network, the same fixed-fare standard that applies to a Canberra airport transfer extends to transfers and touring days across Italy, with a local driver absorbing the parts of the day that catch self-driving visitors out.
Rather than working through Italy region by region, this guide starts with what's genuinely different about driving there compared with driving at home, works through what that difference actually looks like in Rome, along the Amalfi Coast, in Venice, Tuscany and Milan, and finishes with a sample multi-city itinerary and the practical details worth knowing before you book.
Driving on the Other Side, in a Different Style
The first adjustment is the most literal one. Australia drives on the left; Italy, like the rest of mainland Europe, drives on the right — which means a visiting Australian isn't just adjusting to a foreign road network, but to the basic mechanics of steering, overtaking and roundabout direction all at once, usually within hours of stepping off a long-haul flight. It's a bigger adjustment than the UK or Ireland, where Australians at least keep the same side of the road even if the countryside looks nothing like home.
Beyond which side of the road, Italian driving style itself runs noticeably more assertive than most Australian visitors expect. Lane markings are treated as a general guide rather than a boundary, following distances shrink considerably once traffic picks up, and scooters move through gaps in traffic that a visiting driver often doesn't register as gaps at all until one has already gone through. None of it is reckless by local standards — it's simply a different negotiation of shared road space, and one a local chauffeur has spent years reading.
The ZTL: Italy's Invisible Checkpoint
The single biggest trap for a self-driving visitor in Italy isn't the traffic — it's the Zona a Traffico Limitato, or ZTL, a camera-enforced restricted zone that more than a hundred Italian towns and cities operate in some form across their historic centres. A ZTL doesn't look like a checkpoint. There's no boom gate, no attendant, often little more than a small sign bolted to a wall that a tourist walking past wouldn't give a second glance — but a vehicle without the right permit that crosses that line is caught on camera, and the fine arrives by post, sometimes to a home address in Australia, months after the trip is over.
Every major Italian city runs its ZTL a little differently — Rome's covers most of the centro storico during the day, Florence's wraps around a similarly compact historic core, and Milan operates a separate congestion charge zone on top of its own ZTL for parts of the week. A rental car's GPS doesn't reliably flag any of it, and a visiting driver typically only learns the boundaries exist once they've already crossed one. A local chauffeur already knows exactly where every line sits, which makes the entire problem disappear rather than needing to be managed.
Rome Beyond the Checkpoint
Once the ZTL is someone else's problem, Rome opens up as one of the most rewarding cities on an Italian itinerary. Vatican City — technically its own sovereign state within Rome, and the smallest in the world by both size and population — holds the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica, both best visited early, since the queues by mid-morning can run well over an hour even with tickets booked in advance. The Colosseum and the Roman Forum beside it remain extraordinary even on a second or third visit, and the two are usually paired with a transfer timed around the midday heat rather than through it.
Away from the headline sights, Trastevere's tangle of cobbled lanes on the west bank of the Tiber is one of Rome's most atmospheric neighbourhoods after dark, and one that a GPS genuinely struggles to route through cleanly given how narrow and irregular its streets are. The Appian Way, Rome's oldest road and still partly paved with its original Roman stones, runs south of the city past a string of underground catacombs that most first-time visitors never hear about, let alone see.
Rome Highlights Worth Building a Day Around
- Vatican Museums & the Sistine Chapel
- St Peter's Basilica and its dome
- The Colosseum and Roman Forum
- Trastevere's cobbled lanes after dark
- The Appian Way's catacombs
- The Pantheon's 2,000-year-old dome
The Amalfi Coast: When the Road Is the Attraction
Nowhere in Italy makes the case for chauffeured transport more directly than the Amalfi Coast. The SS163, the coastal road linking Positano, Amalfi and Ravello, is a near-continuous run of blind hairpin bends cut into a cliff face above the Tyrrhenian Sea, shared with tour coaches, scooters and local traffic that all treat the road's width as more of a suggestion than a rule. It's one of the most photographed drives in the world and, for a visiting driver behind the wheel for the first time, one of the most stressful.
In peak season the SS163 effectively becomes one lane of slow-moving traffic in each direction for hours at a stretch, and parking in Positano or Amalfi itself ranges from scarce to nonexistent well before midday. None of that changes the view — the pastel-coloured terraces cascading down Positano's cliffside, Ravello's clifftop gardens looking out over the bay, Amalfi's own ninth-century cathedral — but it changes who should be dealing with the road in order to enjoy it.
Positano's Cliffside Streets
Pastel terraces cascading toward a beach that's easiest to reach without a car to park.
Ravello's Clifftop Gardens
Villa Rufolo and Villa Cimbrone's gardens, looking out over the Bay of Salerno.
Pompeii's Preserved Ruins
An entire Roman city preserved by the same eruption that destroyed it in 79 AD.
Capri & the Blue Grotto
A short crossing from Sorrento to an island retreat used since Roman times.
Venice: The Drive That Ends at the Water
Venice breaks the pattern of every other city on an Italian itinerary, because no transfer can actually enter it. Venice's historic centre is built across more than a hundred small islands linked by canals and footbridges, with no roads at all — every chauffeured transfer ends at Piazzale Roma or the mainland town of Mestre, with the final leg into the city completed on foot, by water taxi, or along the canals by vaporetto.
That final leg matters more than it sounds like it should, particularly when a cruise departure or a flight connection sits at the other end of the day. A transfer to Venice is really a transfer to the edge of the lagoon, timed to connect cleanly with whichever onward crossing the day's schedule needs — which is a different kind of planning from a standard point-to-point transfer, and one worth flagging when booking rather than assuming it'll sort itself out on arrival. St Mark's Square, the Doge's Palace and the Rialto Bridge all sit within the car-free centre, a genuinely unique urban environment that rewards slow exploration on foot once the mainland transfer is handled cleanly.
Florence, Siena and the Tuscan Back Roads
Florence's historic centre holds an extraordinary concentration of Renaissance art and architecture within a compact, largely pedestrianised core — the Uffizi Gallery, Michelangelo's David, and Brunelleschi's dome atop the Duomo, still the largest brick dome ever built nearly six centuries after it was completed. Like Rome and Milan, Florence runs its own ZTL across the historic centre, and like both of them, the city itself is built around pedestrian movement rather than private cars.
The Tuscan countryside beyond Florence is where the character of the drive changes completely — the hill towns of Siena, San Gimignano and Montepulciano, the vineyard roads of Chianti, and the cypress-lined farmland that's defined postcard Tuscany for generations are all connected by winding rural roads that reward a slower, better-paced day rather than a rental car working to a tight schedule. It's touring rather than transfer, and the difference shows in how the day feels by the time it's over.
Milan: Two Airports, One Tight Schedule
Milan is Italy's financial and fashion capital rather than its tourist centre, and increasingly the city where Drivision's corporate clients spend most of their Italian itinerary. Major financial institutions, fashion houses and design firms are headquartered here, and Milan Fashion Week each February and September fills the city's hotels and venues with an entirely different kind of visitor to the heritage-trail traveller further south.
Two airports serve the city — Malpensa, which handles most international arrivals, and Linate, considerably closer to the centre and favoured for faster access on domestic and some European routes — and a driver who knows which one a given schedule actually favours saves real time on a tight corporate day. The Duomo di Milano, a Gothic cathedral begun in 1386 and not fully completed until the 1960s, anchors the city centre a short walk from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the world's oldest shopping arcades. Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, housed nearby, requires a timed, advance-booked entry — worth building into an itinerary well before arrival, since walk-up tickets don't exist for it.
A Sample Itinerary: Rome to Venice by Road
A multi-city Italian trip usually looks something like this on paper: fly into Rome, spend several days there and along the Amalfi Coast, work north through Tuscany, and finish in Venice before flying home — and the road character changes completely at almost every stage of it. Rome to the Amalfi Coast runs mostly on autostrada before narrowing into the SS163's hairpins for the final approach. The Amalfi Coast back up to Tuscany returns to motorway for the bulk of the distance, before the last hour or two shifts onto the kind of winding rural roads that reward patience rather than speed. Tuscany to Venice is almost entirely motorway, flat and fast, right up until the drive ends — because for Venice, unlike every other stop on the itinerary, the drive simply stops at the edge of the lagoon rather than finishing at a hotel door.
None of those transitions needs to be planned by the visitor. Mentioning the full itinerary when booking — rather than arranging each leg separately — means the arrangements are confirmed before you land, with a driver who already knows which stretch of a given day calls for an autostrada and which calls for third gear and patience.
Food, Wine and the Pace of the Day
Italian food is intensely regional, and one of the real pleasures of a multi-city Italian trip is how differently it's cooked from one stop to the next — Rome's pasta built around guanciale and pecorino, Naples as the genuine birthplace of pizza, and Tuscany's simpler, olive-oil-forward cooking built around bread, beans and grilled meat. A driver with local knowledge is as useful for finding the trattoria a few streets back from the tourist strip as for navigating the traffic to reach it.
Wine country rewards the same local knowledge. Chianti and Montalcino in Tuscany, Barolo in Piedmont, and the Prosecco hills of the Veneto are all genuine touring destinations in their own right, most of them reachable as a day trip from a base city rather than requiring a dedicated base of their own.
Choosing When to Go
April, May, September and October are generally considered Italy's best travel months — warm enough for comfortable sightseeing, without the extreme heat and peak crowds of July and August, when much of Italy's own population also takes its summer holidays and the Amalfi Coast in particular fills to capacity. Rome and Florence become genuinely uncomfortable in the height of summer, with daytime temperatures regularly exceeding 35°C and minimal shade across their stone-paved historic centres.
Winter brings a quieter, more local Italy — shorter days, a real chance of snow in the hill towns and northern lakes, but considerably thinner crowds at major sights and a more relaxed pace generally. Venice's Carnevale in February, with its elaborate masks and costumed processions, is worth building a trip around in its own right if the timing allows, and Milan's trade fair and fashion calendar is worth checking before booking if the trip has any business purpose at all.
How Drivision Can Assist You
Through our overseas partner network, Drivision extends its fixed-fare, no-surge standard to transfers and touring days across Italy — one quote, agreed before you set off, regardless of which ZTL zone, cliffside bend or trade fair traffic jam the day throws at it.
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1Airport & City Transfers Fixed-fare transfers between Rome, Milan, Florence and Naples airports and their city centres, with flight tracking built in.
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2Coastal & Countryside Touring Days Chauffeured day trips along the Amalfi Coast, through Tuscany's wine country and to the edge of the Venice lagoon.
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3Multi-City Itinerary Coordination Linked transfers across a Rome-to-Venice itinerary, planned around the road character of each leg rather than booked separately.
Now Available Through Our Overseas Network
Arrange Chauffeured Transport in Italy
Getting Started
Whether it's a single Rome airport transfer, a full day along the Amalfi Coast, or a coordinated multi-city itinerary from Rome to Venice, booking ahead through our overseas partner network means the arrangements are confirmed before you land rather than worked out on arrival. Fixed-fare pricing applies just as it does at home — the quote agreed before you set off is the fare you pay.
If your itinerary spans several Italian cities or combines a coastal touring day with a corporate schedule, mention the full itinerary when you book. Multi-city Italian trips are planned a little differently from a single point-to-point transfer, and knowing the whole trip in advance means fewer surprises once you land.
"Italy asks a visiting driver to adjust to the opposite side of the road, a different driving culture, and restricted zones that carry real fines — a local chauffeur has already solved all three, long before a visitor needs to."
