ZTL Bergamo
Bergamo is two towns stacked on top of one another, and the upper one is closed. Città Bassa, the lower town, is an ordinary working city you can drive around. Città Alta, on the hill above it, is a walled Venetian town of narrow stone streets that is restricted around the clock. The distinction matters more here than almost anywhere else in Italy, because Bergamo's airport sits ten minutes away and a very large number of visitors collect a hire car and drive straight at the hill.
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Limited Traffic Zones in Bergamo
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ZTL Bergamo
Città Alta 24 h · the other zones differ
24 zones on the Comune's list — the walled upper town (Città Alta) plus many lower-town streets. Only some are permanent 24 h.
Two towns, and only one of them is drivable
The restriction covers the walled upper town continuously — not during set hours, but all day and all night. The Comune's own list runs to twenty-four separate zones, most of them streets down in the lower town, and they do not all follow Città Alta's round-the-clock rule, so check the one you are actually driving into. The upper town is the part every visitor comes for: Piazza Vecchia, the Colleoni Chapel, the basilica, the walk along the ramparts with the Lombard plain laid out below.
Città Alta is also simply a bad place to take a car. The streets were laid for carts, they are steep, several are stepped, and the ones that are not are usually full of people walking in the road because there is no room on the pavement. Even residents with permits tend to leave the car below. Treat the whole of the upper town as somewhere you arrive on foot.
The funicular is the intended way up
A funicular has run from the lower town up to Piazza Mercato delle Scarpe, just inside the walls, since the nineteenth century. It takes a couple of minutes, runs frequently from morning until late, and lands you in the middle of the old town. Leave the car in the lower town within reach of the bottom station and ride up; this is not a workaround, it is how Bergamo is designed to be visited.
A second, shorter funicular continues from the upper town to San Vigilio, the hill above it, which is worth the trip for the view back over the roofs. If you would rather walk, footpaths and stepped lanes climb through the gates from the lower town in fifteen or twenty minutes, steeply but pleasantly.
Arriving from the airport
Milan Bergamo — Orio al Serio — is a few kilometres from the city, and for many people it is the first Italian airport they land at and the place they pick up a hire car. That combination is exactly how ZTL fines happen: an unfamiliar car, a sat-nav routed for the shortest distance, and a hotel address that turns out to be inside the walls.
If you are heading straight onward into the lakes or the mountains, none of this affects you. If you are stopping in Bergamo first, work out before you leave the airport whether your accommodation is in the upper town, and if it is, ask the property where it expects you to park. A property inside the walls can usually arrange authorisation for a vehicle to reach the door, but it has to be arranged in advance, with your plate and your arrival date.
The walls you are driving around
The ramparts that define the zone are not decorative. They were built by Venice in the sixteenth century, when Bergamo was the western frontier of the Republic, and they are substantial enough that the city was never seriously attacked afterwards. They survive complete, four kilometres of them, and in 2017 they were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of a group of Venetian defensive works.
The top of the walls is now a promenade, and walking the circuit at dusk is the thing to do in Bergamo. It also makes the ZTL easy to understand: the boundary is not an administrative line drawn on a map, it is a physical wall with gates cut through it, and the gates are where the cameras are.
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Show Bergamo on the interactive mapOther ZTL cities in Lombardy
Zone shapes are derived from publicly available information, including accessibilitacentristorici.it and OpenStreetMap; base map © OpenStreetMap and © CARTO. Boundaries are simplified and hours are indicative — a guide, not an official source.