All roads lead to ...
There were an awful lot of roads leading to this place! Only later I realized that it actually means 'one way'. I'm glad I didn't ask somebody for the way to senso unico!
Sent by: Kathryn
Comments
I used to work in Ibiza as a tour guide. Some clients came to me one day saying they had had a lovley picnic. When I asked where they had gone they said the sign said Ceda el paso. They thought it just as funny as I did when I said they had been at a 'give way' sign.
In the 80s my husband to be and I travelled overnight from Switzerland to Venice. The train was unbelievably long and when we awoke in the morning we had stopped at binario. We could see no other information from the window and after quite a while the train continued. We soon realised that the train was leaving Venice for Trieste. And, of course, binario means 'rail line'.
A colleague went to Italy by car. When he parked, the friend travelling with him advised him to write down the name of the street where he parked his car. Thus, later there would be no problems finding the parked car again. At the end of the day, they started to look for the street where they parked the car. As they couldn't find it, they pulled out the paper with the name written and started inquiring for the street. All they've got were puzzled faces until they understood that there was no Via Senso Unico in the city. But then the colleague's friend got a brilliant idea. Right after parking the car, they went to the nearest café to have a legendary Italian espresso. And as the friend likes his coffee non-sweetened, he put the little sugar bags he got with it in his pocket without thinking. He pulled out one of it now and showed it to a cab driver asking him to drive them to the address written on the bags. They were driving for some time and only after leaving the city, they found there was something fishy about it. They've asked the driver where he was taking them and discovered that they asked him to drive them to the sugar factory. They found the car later that night all right.
When travelling around Italy as a student, my dad also had this problem - he wondered why almost every town had a sign pointing to senso unico yet it was never on a map. It was only years late that he realised what it actually meant!
It's true that 'binario' means rail line/track, but more important, it's the word used in Italian for 'platform'. So, for example, 'the train now arriving at platform 1' = binario uno.
Flag this comment