During my drive around Sicily, I did my best to take the longer, more scenic route between destinations. I relied heavily on my car’s GPS, which also warned of upcoming speed cameras which are many. One of the things I quickly realized about GPS however, was that it didn’t always take into consideration whether I was supposed to be driving on a particular road. Many cities and small towns have Limited Traffic Zones ZTLs, for which your license plate needs to be registered in order to enter. I was aware of this and able to navigate around them. So rely on GPS but also keep your eyes open and read signs. GPS also lead me down a dead end alley at one point in Chiaramonte Gulfi- there was a sign but I didn’t understand what it meant until afterwards (see below).
There are only two roads that have tolls as far as I know in Sicily, the A18 and A20 Autostradas. I was able to avoid using these until it was time to go from Taormina to Milazzo. I considered a longer non-toll route but it was through the mountains and would have taken 2hr 30m instead of the 1h 15min. That brings up another thing I found useful, was previewing my route on Google Maps Street View the night before. You can drop a look along the route and ensure that you will be traveling good roads, or check out an intersection in advance that may be confusing. Driving in Sicily is NOT hard and it is really the only way to enjoy the countryside. I read all the doomsday warnings about not renting a car and how crazy the Sicilian drivers are. It was intimidating but once you get out there and start mixing it up with rest of the traffic you will see it is not a big deal. The only thing that really irritated me was the Sicilian habit of tailgating. Even when you are exceeding the speed limit and there is someone in front of you, there is inevitably some jackass 2 feet off your bumper.
The rental car companies do not provide transponders, so you will have to pay as you go on the toll roads. This added a little stress because I wanted to make sure I didn’t get in the wrong lane at a toll booth and end up meeting an Italian police officer. The systems is simple- take a ticket when you enter the toll road and pay with cash or card when you exit. I found that even the toll booths that were marked as occupied by a person were now self-paying, but there was a button to press if you needed assistance (prepare for the line of cars behind you to not be happy if you do this). To simplify, look for the white signs. There will be a little picture of a person in a car reaching out the window. The yellow signs are for Telepass, and there are also some lanes that have yellow and white but I would avoid these too because you may have an impatient Telepass person behind you. You can pay with bills, coins or card. There is a little basket that pops out and you can put coins in it. Since I had a pocket full of coins, I just dumped a handful in the basket and it gave me back what I overpaid (this is faster than trying to count out coins).
