Some good advice from the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
"Florence, Italy — The trouble with Americans, a Florentine told a friend, is that we think the best way to get from point A to point B is a straight line. For Italians, he said, the journey is the destination.
When traveling in Tuscany, it's best to adopt the Italian point of view. You'll drive yourself crazy otherwise. Outside of the highways that connect major cities, there are no straight lines. The roads curve through the hills like figure eights. What looks like a short trip on your map may well take hours. And the Cheshire cat is Tuscany's traffic engineer: You'll not infrequenly get to a crossroads and discover that the signs for the town you seek point in both directions."