The best driving roads in Italy

Italy holds two distinct driving worlds. The first is the alpine north — the Dolomites, the Stelvio massif, the lakes of Como and Garda — where the geography produces roads that simply do not exist anywhere else. The Stelvio Pass with its 48 numbered hairpins, the Great Dolomites Road threading between vertical limestone walls, the Sella Ronda loop that ties together four passes in a single circuit. This is bucket-list driving at its most concentrated.

The second is the long, slower south — Tuscany's white roads, the Amalfi coast, the Apennines. Different rhythm, different rewards, but real driving country if you have the time. For a first-trip enthusiast, the alpine north is where to go: Bolzano, Cortina or Bormio as a base, and you can drive a different world-class pass every day for a week.

Italian roads have a reputation for variable surface quality, and it's partly deserved — some of the smaller Dolomite roads are patched and rough — but the major passes are well maintained. Traffic is the bigger consideration: Italian summer weekends bring motorcyclists in serious numbers, and the photogenic passes (Stelvio, Pordoi) become almost unusable midday in July and August. Drive early, drive shoulder season, drive midweek.