Imagine you've just arrived in Italy, to be told that to access what would be your home for the next 2 weeks, you would have to drive up a ramp rising out of the ground - see my pic! We were travelling as a family group. Our destination lay in a village in Tuscany, some 4km off the main road. To get to it, we had to drive up a winding road with at least 5 hairpin bends/switchbacks. However, that was nothing compared with the horrors that lay ahead! To get to our villa, which nestled in the hills above the village, it was necessary to turn the cars around in the "village square" to face the access "road". This road was about 600m in length, and had a gradient of around 1:4 at its steepest point, with three or four hairpins. Needless to say, it was a two-way road, though mercifully I never had to deal with an oncoming vehicle.
The fun part was driving up this thing at night - I needed sideways pointing headlights! The Citroen DS21 had such a system, by which the headlights turned in response to steering input.
