wash your language

  • All Posts
  • Publications
  • Services
  • Contact
  • Fairies at the Stone Circle
You are here: Home / Italy / Seatbelts optional

Seatbelts optional

May 3, 2016 by EmmaP

It’s school pickup time and I offer a lift home to my friend and her two kids. Like us, they are a non-Italian family. We realise that giving them a lift would mean fitting six people into the five spaces of our car. We discuss putting one child on a mum’s lap with a seat belt around both. We know we could manage, it’s just a two minute drive to their house. But she wants to play it safe and decides to walk home with one of the kids instead. Four in the car, all belted up. That’s fine.

Up in this Tuscan hilltown we call home, the roads are mostly narrow and twisty and you soon learn how to park in awkward spaces. Reaching my friend’s place, I carefully edge the car backwards alongside the railing outside the building. The trick is to squeeze it in just enough to feel you’ve made an effort to allow the neighbours space to pass, but not so tight that a child can’t open the door to squeeze out. All the same, I pull in the driver-side mirror. To be on the safe side.

As I’m reversing/squeezing, I see coming up behind me a white Smart car – one of those “urban”, very small cars that older Italians love and still manage to drive fast. The car really is tiny and the driver takes up most of it. Or… what’s that? … do I see two drivers? There is one large man, but he seems to have the face of a six-year-old. In fact that is a six-year-old, a boy, whose hands are also on the steering wheel. He’s sitting on the driver’s lap.

As the B side of my brain keeps moving my own car, the A side is asking a few things. Is that six-year-old driving that car? Is it so small that there’s no seat for him? Is it physically possible to even get a seat belt around him if he’s on someone’s lap? Do a car like that even have seat belts?

Of course it must. It’s a smart car.

At this stage, having spent seven months driving here everyday I’ve become used to seeing the optional use of seat belts. After years of living in Norway and Canada, where it’s unthinkable to even have the wrong sized booster seat for your child, this has been an eye-opener. It shouldn’t be. I suspect in most parts of the world, seatbelts are optional or ignored, and I’ve – shock, horror – even seen kids go belt-free in Ireland.

It’s fun, but really quite pointless, to reminicise about my childhood car memories – as the youngest of four siblings and many cousins, I was often the one perching uncomfortably in the middle bit of the back seat, inching towards the front-seat adult conversation, or simply just placed on the floor. Seat belts weren’t much of an option, they came in only in, um, 1992. Ah sure, there was less traffic, it wasn’t so dangerous back then. We like to think.

IMG_5672

But my heart is in my mouth now when I think of my own kids being driven around in hazardous circumstances. My nine-year-old was driven to and from a party here one evening and was more excited to tell us afterwards about the seating arrangements in the car: coming home there were eight people in the car, who sat on laps or in the boot/trunk, or if they were in a seat with a seat belt, there was no real need to belt up.

Several Italian friends have been shocked by my birthday party story. According to my sources, seat belts laws are definitely enforced here and indeed you often see the other extreme of safety- the highest-end car seats in place for every child well into teenage years.

But every day you can see all variety of seatbelt neglect. Some of the variations I have seen with my own eyes, especially along the school run:

  • Child moving around in back seat or front passenger seat, presumably not belted in.
  • Multiple children moving around, ditto.
  • Child sitting on driver’s lap, possibly belted? Probably not.
  • Child sitting in the boot/trunk or perched up in the back window.
  • Infant held onto the mother’s lap in the back seat, both of them sitting perpendicularly with back to the window (still trying to figure that one out)

As for mopeds, they almost seem safer as I see the child and adult always wearing a helmet and moving at a reasonable speed.

And of course the school bus jaunts off on trips with no seat belts in place (still no doubt a common scenario in many countries) and my kids seem to enjoy the bumping around involved in it – they choose carefully who they get to sit across from. Indeed my younger first became aware of the seatbelt-optional rule on a quick trip to Rome three years ago when we asked her in the taxi: why won’t you put your seatbelt on? Her answer: well the driver’s sure not using one so why should I?

Note to readers: Driving in Italy is offering me more than one blog post, to mention at the very least the near-constant use of cellphones. More to follow…

Back at my friend’s house, I watch the Smart car pull up to the building opposite and the child jumps out to press a button. The Italian-style protect-all-my-property-gate opens slowly and the boy stands to the side while his grandfather (or father?) hooshes the car up the little driveway. Reappearing with a little scooter, he sets the boy up to scoot around on the road before they head into the house. The older man sees my car, still carefully reeling into position, and his arm immediately goes out to protect the boy, to wave him away from my car. There’s little danger of that, I have my eyes glued to him, whizzing around happily on his scooter.

Or maybe his grandfather knows that the kid can drive better than he scoots.

 


Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

Filed Under: Cars, Italy

Recent posts

  • The Accordion’s Tale June 29, 2023
  • Mothers on Buses July 8, 2022
  • The Wall of Pink Covid Hearts October 11, 2021

A Blog and More

I write about language and the quirks of our family life in Dublin and previously in Italy and Norway. Read More…

RSS
Facebook
Facebook
fb-share-icon
Twitter
Visit Us
Tweet
Instagram

Instagram

Facebook

Cover for Wash Your Language
216
Wash Your Language

Wash Your Language

Musings on language and daily life in Ireland with memories from Canada, Italy and Norway

Wash Your Language

2 weeks ago

Wash Your Language
Here's one from the archives - back before I had a dog, I'd spend many waking hours looking at other peoples' dogs. Whatever the breed. ... See MoreSee Less

Besotted by Bassets - wash your language

washyourlanguage.com

It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella ...
View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Wash Your Language

2 weeks ago

Wash Your Language
Ever feel like your day is full of cliches? Check out this piece written by my clever, fellow Dublin writer, Stephen Brady. -------At the crack of dawnI rose and shoneHad a breakfast of championsAnd blew out the stopsGrabbed the bull by the hornsAnd hit the streetTo meet and greetThe great unwashed;I wended my wayTo join the clubWaiting for the rubOf the greenTo set the sceneOf what might have been.I left no stone unturnedWhile the home fires burnedAnd the powers-that-beHad an air of mystery.But the empty vesselsMade an unholy noiseAnd the unstoppable forceMet the immoveable objectAnd the next thing I knewIt was an open-and-shut caseOf “we are where we are”where I was.At the eleventh hourIn my ivory towerI circled the wagonsGot my ducks in a row;I let sleeping dogs layWhere every dog has his dayAnd all the world was a stageWhen we were on the same pageI was flavour of the month‘Til I was yesterday’s newsMy talk was cheapBut I didn’t lose sleepThen it hit me like a ton of bricks!I’d been out of the loopLanded right in the soupAnd I was the last to knowI should have gone with the flow. At the end of the dayIt was a game of two halvesI was ahead by a noseBut got pipped at the postBy the Host with the MostAnd if turnabout is fair playYou could colour-me-amazedWhen the chickens I countedDidn’t come home to roost.For the grass it is greenerWhere the rolling stones gatherNo moss.(No loss.) Too many cooks spoiled my brothAnd a soft answer turn’d away WrathBut there were too many chiefsAnd not enough indians.Many hands made light workOf my best-laid plans(I’d had the whole world in my hands!)So I beat a retreatTo a threadbare roomWhere I quietly fumedTil the sun was under the yardarmAnd the daydodgilydamnablydone.-----Also available on the Inkslingers blog here. inkies.ie/record-of-a-day-rendered-entirely-in-cliches-by-stephen-brady/ ... See MoreSee Less

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Wash Your Language

3 months ago

Wash Your Language
Here's a (true) story I wrote and told at an event in Belfast last year. It's the tale of the accordion that travelled many places with me and which I decided to pass on to someone who would need it more than me. The nice folk at BBC Radio Ulster recorded some of the stories from the event and you can hear it here (the first one). www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0fr7t46 And if you have an instrument to donate in Ireland you can find the Gift of Music to Ukrainians page here. www.facebook.com/groups/5018344234885700with Tenx9washyourlanguage.com/the-accordions-tale/ ... See MoreSee Less

The Accordion's Tale - wash your language

washyourlanguage.com

I wrote down this tale of an accordion looking for a new life, and I told it at a storytelling event in Belfast last November – the wonderful Tenx9 monthly event. The theme was Small World, and so t...
View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Wash Your Language

4 months ago

Wash Your Language
Amazing! ... See MoreSee Less

South African firefighters sing and dance after arriving at Edmonton's airport

www.youtube.com

More than 200 South African firefighters deployed to help combat Canada's wildfires performed a dance at Edmonton's airport.Subscribe to CTV News to watch mo...

Video

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Wash Your Language

6 months ago

Wash Your Language
I've had to clear every last thing out of my parents' house, the one they lived in (and we grew up in) from the mid-60s on. 2 weeks ago it passed along to a new family and it's starting a new life.The deepest reaches of the attic were cleared and I rediscovered some treasures from my life. Starting with this book.I bought it on my first ever trip to Oxford when I was about 19 - took a day trip with a friend while staying with my sister over the summer. I found this gorgeous 1931 edition in a stand at the old covered market, which I think is still there. We also picked up a sandwich which we brought to eat on a bench in Christchurch meadow. The book was inside a paper bag with some postcards I'd just written.An hour later, on the bus, I realised the bag was still on the bench and I'd never see it again. If the police found it they might blow it up, those being the days when every package or bag was a potential threat.Turns out the police did find it, but instead of destroying it they looked inside, saw one of the postcards addressed to Mum & Dad Prunty with our home address, and they posted the whole lot back in a padded envelope. With a compliments slip from Thames Valley Police.How could I have known that in the same city 4 years later I'd meet my husband? And that 30 years later I still wouldn't have read the book? ... See MoreSee Less

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Wash my language?

Språkvask is the Norwegian word for proofing text. Literally it means “language wash”; a more poetic way of saying it!

Blog comments

  • Donna on The Wall of Pink Covid Hearts
  • EmmaP on Tunes in an Empty Pub
  • Cathy Hogan on Tunes in an Empty Pub

© 2023 · Handcrafted with d by 2 Pups Design Co.