Speeding fines may be hard to avoid for most Italian motorists but one priest has managed to get his ticket annulled by showing that he was racing to perform the last rites on a dying man.
Stanislaw Wardega, a Polish Franciscan based in the town of Foligno, was snapped by a speed trap camera as he tore along at 106 km/h on a country road where the limit was 50.
When his speeding fine arrived in the post, the indignant priest took it to the local justice of the peace and explained that he had been rushing to perform the last rights on a sick man.
He said he was actually happy about the way he had driven because it had meant reaching the moribund man in time.
Justice Luciano Cicioni, ruling on the case last weekend, decided that in fact the priest had been in a "state of necessity" because driving slowly would have meant "serious and irreparable damage" for the dying man.
The Last Rites are the Roman Catholic sacrament reserved for the sick and dying. It is a spiritual preparation for death which involves anointing the sick person with special oils.
The case of the Polish priest was not the first time the evidence of speed trap cameras had been set aside for similar reasons. Earlier this month an 80-year-old village priest was also let off his speeding fine because he was going to confess a dying woman.
Fines for speeding and other driving offences are a controversial subject in Italy at present.
Consumer groups accused local councils on Monday of fining too many motorists and demanded to know what happened to the money raked in.
The polemics came in the wake of a survey carried out by a top Italian newspaper, which found that town councils are now earning some 1.25 billion euros a year from fines.
The paper, Il Sole 24 Ore, said the fines were like an extra tax of about 35 euros on every Italian with a driving licence and claimed that traffic sanctions were shoring up the creaking accounts of many councils.
The number of fines has shot up in Italy over the last six years, mainly because local authorities have installed speed traps on sections of road where they know speeding is common.
"It's true that the rules of the road are often treated as optional by Italian motorists but there are too many people getting fined for them all to be lawbreakers," it continued.
Codacons noted that every year, justices of the peace annul thousands of fines wrongly slapped on motorists, often because of technical errors.
The Sole 24 report was based on a survey of 8,000 Italian municipalities. The city of Rome was where the value of fines was the highest: some 207 million euros in fines in 2005.
But a small town in Tuscany, named Santa Luce, appeared to be the biggest winner. On one 800-metre stretch of road near the town, a speed camera raised 1.7 million euros in 2005, more than three times as much as the town reaped in taxes.
