Before you all laugh, wipe the tears from your eyes and say "ha ha, good luck!" What I am looking for is not to park in Rome centre or anything like that, but to find somewhere to dump the rental-car on the outskirts, whilst I spend 3 nights living in an apartment with some friends.

Anybody have any experience of park-n-ride carparks or airport long stay kind of things that don't charge the Earth for a few days of leaving your car in the sunshine?

Google can answer only so much, but I trust the Sabritsi to provide much more insight in these matters.

Try asking on http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowForum-g1 ... Lazio.html

Soz, I've only ever parked in Rome for a few hours, mind that was in the centre. I do remember passing a park and ride place as you haed into rome from the north after the toll booth on the A1. Just off the GRA is a station called Centro Rai. Looks to be some parking there.

SJ

(I found some but then google maps decided to drop back to the uk)

Is it worth handing your rental car back at Termini station (if your company has an office there, else the airport) and then picking up another when you leave the city?

signol

Thanks all...Handing the rental car back has proven to be the cheaper option. The one way 'penalty' is not as much as the combined cost of parking for 5 nights (up from 3) in a secure carpark near to the (awesome) apartment we're staying in. Plus all the people I ask about driving into Rome off of the HQDC roads get a 1000 yard stare and start trembling.

Ahh, driving in Rome is ok, you just not gotta show any nerves, know where your going, even if your lost pretend to know where your going, watch out for the many bikes. and oh the HQDC, the inner ring, that was 2 lanes plus HS, but there were 4 lanes of traffic. Fun!!!!

Oh 2lanes and Shoulder to four lanes sounds like fun indeed......

Better have a stiff one, probably easy enuf as the services sell alcohol over there !

All the coach parks in Rome are operated by the mafia

I assume most car parks will be too

Lovely hols, lovely time.

A few observations.

1) Signage is a joke, it just peters out in many places, bless the sat-nav. But then again, I say that about any country that isn't the UK...but I grew up in Europe due to father in forces so not too blinkered.
2) Men at work, usually stand around in live lanes, protected only by flags and Mother Mary.
3) The police are cracking down on the poor reputation of Italian driving. Everywhere with speed cameras.
4) Toll roads are nice and quiet except rush hour for obvious reasons.
5) The National Trust would have a fit over there, beautiful Tuscan hill town, with a bloody great autostrada wrapped around it...Or the best one was the lovely church tower at Osia Sopra, that has a whopping great bridge over the motorway type Autogrill (services) slapped right in front of it.
6) Driving is very much 'Will of God' kind of driving, rather than it being the fault of the drivers. Saw plenty of over turned cars with confused occupants being helped by crowds. Low speed overturnings...How?
7) The authorities clean accidents off of the autostrada quickly. I only spent 45 mins waiting near Geneva, and then they convoyed us past tangled metal, over sanded surfaces. Not like the UK where it's 8 hours needing a piss before a surly policemen informs you that somebody has died. Not my genes, you've probably taken them to the morgue by now and I need a wee is my ex-services answer. Not overly shocked by the attempted emotional punch. Get the sand down and convoy us on our way please.

A few comments:

3. There's nothing new there, though probably the use of cameras rather than actual cops is a newer development. The cops have always had occasional blitzes on speeding, but the result is a very patchy, inconsistent and arbitrary application of the law.

5. Been to Oxford or Cambridge, or for that matter Stockholm, recently? The juxtaposition of medieval buildings and 60s crap is not limited to Italy. What is noticeable in Italy is the number of ancient buildings that are clearly unconserved and falling into ruins when the same building in the UK would probably be a World Heritage Site. Italy is stuffed full of buildings in all stages of usability, accessibility and decay which date from 753 BC to the Renaissance, and they can't conserve all of them in aspic. Inevitably those that aren't seen as particularly culturally significant will be reused for other things where possible, entailing modifications that we might consider insensitive, and where they're already past use they will be left to crumble further. This isn't helped by seismic activity at many sites.

6. Overturnings etc. -- this will be down to the road quality as much as the driving. Many roads have odd cambers and other features that could easily cause low-speed overturns. On Italian driving in general, there are two dichotomies that make the nutcases particularly memorable. First is the north-south divide. In the north and Tuscany driving isn't especially manic IME, but from Rome southwards it is. The other is the huge speed differential between the people insistent on doing twice the speed limit at all times and those who pootle along very slowly for no apparent reason. I don't mean the equivalent of the UK Sunday 40 in NSL brigade, but people doing tractor speed on a 90 km/h road for no reason. You get this quite a lot in rural Italy but I've never come across it elsewhere.

7. Couldn't agree more.

One way to beat the horrendous congestion in Rome is to do what Keith Richards did, according to his autobiog. He had a loadspeaker fitted to the front of his Bentley while Anita Pallenberg, his long term girlfriend who is half Italian, put on a policewoman's voice and ordered the cars in front to move aside. It did seem to work. However, since I doubt the OP has a Bentley and the services of Anita Pallenberg, it would be a case of hoping for the best as Rome is terrible for driving.

When driving in Rome for the forst time I found the drivers courteous, considerate and reasonably law-abiding. It is of course possible that my judgement was clouded by my driving experience over the previosu few days - in Naples where moped users woudl use machines without lights (yes lights physically absent from their machines).

BTW, the Italian word for a car is "machina".

Macchina. With two Cs.

F!"£ing Italian Autotrash used to come to mind as well.