ZTL zones in Aosta Valley

Driving in Aosta Valley

The Aosta Valley is Italy’s smallest region, its least populous, and the only one on this map with a single restricted centre. It is one long glacial valley running west from the Piedmont plain towards Mont Blanc, with a dozen side valleys climbing off it into the highest mountains in the Alps — Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, Gran Paradiso and Mont Blanc itself all stand on its borders. It is officially bilingual, Italian and French, with Franco-Provençal still spoken in the villages.

Aosta, the regional capital, has the one zone. The town was founded as Augusta Prætoria in 25 BC and the grid of the Roman colony is still the shape of the modern centre, which is why the restricted area is so compact: the Roman theatre, the Porta Prætoria and the Arch of Augustus stand within a few hundred metres of one another, and the streets between them are narrow and largely given over to pedestrians.

Parking in Aosta

The historic centre is barely a kilometre across and is ringed by car parks, so no parking spot is genuinely inconvenient. Leave the car outside the line of the old walls and walk in through one of the gates; from any direction the walk to Piazza Chanoux takes a few minutes. There is no version of this trip in which driving into the centre saves you time.

Aosta has a page of its own with the zone and its hours: ZTL Aosta.

The valley, the tunnels and the seasons

Outside Aosta the constraint on driving is the terrain rather than a camera. The A5 motorway and the SS26 share the valley floor, and every side valley — Cogne, Valtournenche up to Cervinia, Gressoney, Valgrisenche, La Thuile — is a dead end: you drive up and come back the same way. The distances are short and the journey times are not.

Two of the main Alpine crossings begin here. The Mont Blanc tunnel runs from Courmayeur through to Chamonix in France, and the Great St Bernard tunnel into Switzerland; both are tolled and both are expensive, and the Great St Bernard pass road above the tunnel opens only in summer.

Through the winter months, winter tyres or snow chains carried in the car are required on most roads in the region. The requirement is posted on signs, and hire cars do not always come equipped, so it is worth confirming when you book. Several of the ski resorts, Courmayeur and Breuil-Cervinia among them, close their main streets to traffic in season even where there is no camera zone at all.