The best driving roads in Italy

Ask anyone for the best driving roads in Italy and you will get the Dolomites, the Stelvio, maybe the corniche above Lake Como. They are on this list and they earn their place. But the scoring does not know what is famous. It reads corners, hairpins, elevation change and how a road flows, and what it turned up is that Italy’s best tarmac runs far further south than the postcards suggest.

Portella Pomo in Sicily scores 89. Via Sila and the climb from Melito Porto Salvo, both in Calabria, score 88. Vado di Sole crosses the Abruzzo Apennines at 89. None of them appear in the usual lists, all of them out-score Passo di Giau in the Dolomites, and in August you will have them largely to yourself.

The spread is the point. Italy’s 2,686 roads worth a detour run from the Aosta Valley and the Maritime Alps in the northwest, through the Dolomites and the passes above the northern lakes, down the spine of the Apennines, and into Calabria and Sicily. A driving route built from this list can be a long weekend in one region or three weeks the length of the country.

Timing matters more than most lists admit. The high alpine passes close through winter and most open from late May, a few earlier. July and August bring motorhomes and coach traffic to the famous ones, so June and September are the better months in the north. The southern roads stay quiet almost year round.

And scores are geometry, not experience. A road can post 90 and still be a crawl behind motorhomes on the first Sunday of August. Where drivers have logged a road and told us whether it was worth it, we say so on the road’s own page.