Bologna ZTL: 7:00 am to 8:00 pm, every day

Bologna's limited traffic zone is active from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm every day of the week, and outside that band the historic centre is open to any vehicle.

One band, seven days a week

The zone covers the historic centre and works on a single time band, from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm, with no weekday exception and no holiday exception. That is the part that catches out drivers who have learned the rules of other Italian cities: in Rome and Florence the daytime zones go quiet on public holidays, here they do not.

The mechanism itself is the ordinary Italian one: authorized vehicles only inside the time band, cameras at the boundary reading every plate, and the penalty issued automatically to the registered keeper. Nothing stops you as you cross. In Bologna the camera system has a name, Sirio, and the city uses it on the gates.

With a rental car there are two charges rather than one. The rental company bills you for passing your details to the council, and that line usually reaches your card before the fine itself does.

The T is a different rule, and at weekends it closes completely

Via Rizzoli, via Indipendenza and via Ugo Bassi form a T on the map, and that T is not part of the daily band: it is closed to motor traffic around the clock.

On T-Days it goes further and becomes a pedestrian street. The closure runs from 8:00 am on Saturday to 10:00 pm on Sunday, and on public holidays from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm. So the weekend, which in most cities is when a centre relaxes, is when the middle of Bologna is at its most closed to cars.

Read the two rules in that order. Knowing the 7:00 am to 8:00 pm band is not enough to drive under the two towers on a Saturday afternoon, because the T is shut regardless of the hour.

79 camera gates, and the city counts them in the open

The council publishes the gates as open data, which is the one part of this that is easy to verify: 79 gates, all of them active, of which 22 are typed as ZTL, 6 as ZTL Speciale and 2 more as special cases. The rest watch pedestrian areas and reserved bus lanes.

That count is the honest measure of how closed the centre is. It also explains why a wrong turn is expensive here: the gates are not concentrated on a few main approaches, they are spread along the whole boundary.

The same portal publishes the perimeter as a set of polygons with the number of the ordinance that drew them. What it does not publish is the timetable, and that is the gap this page had to fill from elsewhere.

The ticket is digital, and its price is not published

Paper tickets stopped on June 1, 2020: an occasional entry is now a digital permit from Tper, the company that runs the city's transport and its access permits. The permit is activated for one day and one plate, so the plate has to be right before the camera sees it.

What we cannot give you is the price. It sits inside the Tper sales portal and is not written on any page a reader can open, so it is not on this page either. Ask the hotel or check at a Tper counter in the city before you drive in.

The same goes for the perimeter described in words and for the amount of the fine: the council's own pages carry both, and they are built in a way that returns nothing but a licence notice to anyone reading them automatically. That is why Bologna arrived on this site later than Rome, Florence, Milan and Naples.

The rules of the other cities are on ZTL, and the city itself on Bologna.

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