Driving across Europe, one thing asserts itself beyond the beauty—the roadwork. You see it everywhere. From Germany’s Autobahns to Italy’s Autostrade, some of the best driving on earth comes with cones, closures, and heavy traffic. That is the price of good roads. They must be kept up. They must be rebuilt.

After tens of thousands of miles rallying across the continent, you notice the patterns. Some roads tell you what they are before the engines fire. With Ray-Ban Meta onboards and social media influencers exposing the best secrets for clicks, there’s little room for discovery and you know many of the roads worth knowing. The Furka Pass in Switzerland, with its defunct Belvedere Hotel and Bond film glory. The Passo dello Stelvio of Top Gear fame. Very little remains unexplored. Even so, some drives still catch you off guard. After two decades, few have surprised us more than a drive up what locals call the Panoramica in Tuscany.

Folks these days obsess over innovation, efficiency and progress. That’s well and good, but a reading of this substack should reveal how much we value the virtues of the old ways–if not, then we have failed in our mission–but we digress. Great roads prove this better than most things. Like architecture, art and writing, some of the most enduring works have lived for hundreds of years and will likely last hundreds more.

Take the Autostrada del Sole (A1) between Bologna and Florence. In 2015, engineers had finally cut a faster line through the Apennines with the Variante di Valico. They bored deep tunnels, including the long Santa Lucia, and shaved time from the drive. Driving the Variante for the first time, you realize the scope of the work. 60 kilometers, 7 billion euros and 11 years later, another antiquated winding road of Italy gave way to straighter lines, stifling concrete tubes, polluted air, and shorter drive times (theoretically). The locals call it the Direttissima (the Direct Line). Travel in the region grew quicker. Driving grew duller.

With the new highway in place, it’s probably safe to assume it is too costly to remove the old highway. So, unloved as it may be, the Panoramica lives on.