I have recently developed a phobia about driving here in Italy. On my inaugural vacation trip 10+ years ago, I rented a car with sis (she wouldn't drive) and went from Rome all the way down to Sicily on the ferry, around Sicily and back up to Rome via the Amalfi coast. It was great despite:
1.) getting stranded on a scruffy beach in the middle of nowhere for a couple of hours because the rental car wouldn't start. After many aborted attempts I figured out that it was a bad contact in the hatchback and the car wouldn't start with the hatch "open" (no lights or signals to that effect.. just trial and error and cussedness on my part). Beach = sand = problem finally solved.
2.) Driving in Naples where no one pays any attention to the few stoplights.. it's just a kind of pig-pile. One expat blogger recounts asking an old Neapolitan, "is this a one way street?" because only one car could fit. Answer: "If you're going up, it's one-way going up. If you're going down, it's one-way going down."
3.) Driving in Siracusa with, again, "two"-way streets with only room for one car (we are talking 6" on either side), coming to an intersection not on my map. I'm to the south facing north; another car is facing me going south on the north side; a third car is going west to my direct right. PANIC. The west-bound guy got out of his car and made crazy gestures!! I just wanted to get outta there and turned left. But the intersection wasn't big enough, which I was aware of in that kind of slow-motion dream-like awareness that you have when you trip over something, and I intentionally/unintentionally scraped the whole left back fender on the corner wall. After a second or two, I realized the guy who'd gotten out of his car had been gesturing to try to get me to back up and re-position myself for a 'wider' turn.. but I'd been too nervous to listen to him because..
4.) For about a half-hour we had been followed by some young buck along deserted roads. He'd come up reaaalll close, and I'd pull over to let him pass only to find him slowing down for us a few hundred yards ahead, and we played cat&mouse like this for a while. I even caught him looking in his rear-view mirror and combing his hair.. no doubt to make a better impression on his "2 chicks vacationing" prey! After a while he gave up. Dunno what he thought he was gonna get up to with 2 of us!!
5.) Looking at a map and calculating distance to nearest likely lodging town about an hour. Being a flatlander, I didn't "see" a huge mountain range, so it took us 3+ hours and was WAY after dark by the time we got to the town, through unlit, woodsy, poorly-maintained and barely-traveled mtn. roads. Luckily there was room at the "inn" (only space avail. in a 4-star hotel! -but they gave us a cheap rate and even fed us although the dinner service was basically over at that point). We didn't make a v. good impression to the other 'fine dining'-type guests! We'd had no idea that the town was a chi-chi resort.
So anyway the point of all this is.. that it must be a question of age. What used to be 'adventure' is now to be avoided. And.. it's not really the *driving* per se that bugs me.. it's the fear of not finding adequate parking, or getting into tight spots like in Siracusa and doing some damage to me/my car or to someone else. I'm happy to drive anywhere where parking is assured and I know I can get easily from pt. A to pt. B.. but that's about 5% of my desired destinations.
I "should" be able to drive to Rome, with all its crazy roads and traffic.. but I just cringe at the thought of finding myself out of my depth anymore. I worry about becoming an "old lady". If gas were cheaper I might embark on a campaign of immersion and desensitization. If my 81-y.o. Roman MIL can do it, so should I. A 'normal" Italian wife would drive DH to his ultrasound kidney-stone treatments in the center of unfamiliar and hideously-congested Florence; I just couldn't step up to the plate and he takes the train.
Now the occasional scorpion in the house I can deal with! They are non-poisonous here, but my first sighting did put me in shock; now I just whisk them out. Same with garden snakes.. I think they are cool. DH is petrified.
DH also has an extreme fear of heights, which manifested itself when we got some Celtics tickets in the highest row in Boston Garden. I found these actually more comfortable since there was the whole uppermost concourse level behind us and we had a nice "table" with normal chairs and floor instead of the rigid regular seating and steep steps. When I leaned forward at all, DH kept yanking me back from the glass balcony barrier (in front of our table), thinking I was going to somehow fantastically pitch myself downward onto the court!
(Maybe lg4nb can explain that dream 
