112 in Italy: what happens when you call

Dial 112¹ anywhere in Italy: the call is free from any phone, works with no SIM, no credit and a locked screen, and lands in a single response center that routes you to the right service.

The 3 questions that come first

The operator asks 3 things: where you are, what kind of emergency it is, and your name. Answer the location first and keep it simple: a town, a road number, a landmark, the name of the beach.

Behind that call sits the Centrale Unica di Risposta, the single response center, which handles the first level and passes you to the operational room that matters: Polizia di Stato, Carabinieri, the fire brigade, the coast guard or medical rescue. You do not have to know which one you need.

The call costs 0 euro, in every case

The call costs 0 euro from a landline or from a mobile, and it connects with no SIM in the phone, no credit on the account and the screen locked. A tourist SIM that has run out still reaches 112¹.

That is worth knowing on the second day of a trip, when the data plan has died and the phone looks useless.

18 regions out of 20, as of September 2026

The single response center model was live in 18 Italian regions in September 2026: Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardia, Marche, Molise, Piemonte, Puglia, Sardegna, Sicilia, Toscana, Trentino-Alto Adige, Umbria and Valle d'Aosta.

Campania is listed as next to activate and Veneto as in progress. In those 2 regions you still dial 112¹; what changes is the routing behind the number, and our fact sheet does not describe that arrangement, so we do not guess at it.

This status comes from a single ministry page and moves as new centers open. It carries a validity date of March 31, 2027, which is our way of saying: recheck it.

2 ways to reach 112 without speaking

There are 2 non-voice channels. The 112¹ Sordi service is built for deaf callers. The Where ARE U app, free on iOS and Android with a registration, sends your identity and GPS position automatically and opens an emergency without a word spoken, with a text channel attached.

Install and register it at the start of the trip. An app you download during an emergency is an app you do not have.

The portal is in 5 languages

112¹.gov.it is run by the Ministry of the Interior and published in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, so you can read the procedure in your own language before you need it.

Five minutes on that site at the hotel is worth more than any list of numbers copied into a notebook.

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