We have just booked a 2 week trip to Italy and are thinking of buying a sat-nav to take with us as we would use it again at home. This may be a silly question but how would we program it. Here in the UK you just enter a postcode and it comes up with all the roads covered by that code and you just pick the one you want. Does Italy have postcodes? The address for the place we are staying is Villa Elena, Via Palestro, 107
56040 Guardastallo (PI). Do we enter the whole thing, and what does the (PI) mean? We have never driven in Europe before so are very nervous, is it difficult getting on the right road from Pisa airport?
On a separate note has anyone else stayed there and if so what are your views on it
many thanks for any help you can give

I'm certain that the "PI" means Pisa, the regional center. I've used mappy.com with some success.

Yes, Italy has postcodes are called CAP (Codice di avviamento postale). The (PI) stands for Pisa which is the province (provincia), for example (MI) stands for Milano (Milan). From the airport of Pisa getting in the highway is a piece of cake. The airport is at the end of a highway and it is very small, just follow the green highway signs. Italy highways have plenty of directions just follow the the road signs to the city you want to go. Regarding the use of sat-nav, my father in Italy just bought a garmin and it works great for him.

Hi S,

>Does Italy have postcodes? The address for the place we are staying is Villa Elena, Via Palestro, 107
56040 Guardastallo (PI). <

56040 is the postcode.

Enter the address and that number at www.viamichelin.com and it will bring it up.

Many sat navs, such as ToM Tom, want the address. Once it knows what country you want you type in the adress - it gives you acceptable letters to make the spelling of the road name easier - it will then suggest towns, then the house number, and ask you to set it as your destination.
We did that to get to my brother in the UK -turns out his streetname is unique!

The insrtuctions for Tom Tom are very clear and very simple - in fact I used mine straight out of the box without reading the book of words!

Thank you everyone for your replies, very helpful. Now we just need to decide between a tom tom & a garmin as various other threads on here vary between which is the best. We are still going to have 'proper' maps but as this is our first time driving we thought we would give ourselves the best chance by having both.
We have loads of ideas of places we want to visit and most guidebooks seem to suggest that you cant drive into places like Florence. Do they have things like a 'park & ride' on the outskirts? How easy are these to use, we dont speak Italian apart from a few polite phrases so we wont be able to ask for help once there unless someone speaks English.

Sharone,

With the greatest of respect there are a LOT more GPS options out there than a Tom-Tom or a Garmnin.

Hi S,

What's your itinerary?

To Dukey, I know there are loads more to choose from, I just meant those 2 makes seem to be the ones most talked about. For us (assuming we do go ahead and get one) it will come down to price, how user friendly it is and other peoples reccomendations.
To Ira, we have booked into an apartment for 2 weeks so we will be based in one place (this is assuming we actually find our way there). The places we definately want to see are Pisa, Florence, Siena, Montepulciano, Cortona and some of the coast. We also like to relax on holiday so we are hoping to find areas that you can just park up, take a picnic and walk through the countryside. Although we dont know much about wine apart from enjoying drinking it, we would also like to visit a vineyard to see how its made etc, but as I mentioned earlier we dont know much Italian so we would want somewhere we could understand what people were saying. We are going in the first 2 weeks of Sept so hoping the weather will be nice.
Any help & advice from people is much appreciated