they don’t use brakes just horns and “hand”signals
My favorite was a taxi driver in Milan who wanted to turn left across 2 lanes of traffic. He was honking at the car ahead of him stopped at a red light. It seemed like red lights don't mean quite the same thing as in the US. :^)
The Hertz rental guys in Florence gave us a nice map in English showing the easiest was out of town. It was useful since once you left the big cities driving in Italy wasn’t too bad.