ZTL Bologna

The Sirio ZTL: 07:00 to 20:00, every day of the year

The outer restriction covers the whole historic centre inside the ring of viali laid over Bologna’s medieval walls. The Comune states its hours in one line and repeats them on three separate pages: the limitations are enforced by the Sirio camera system “tutti i giorni, dalle 7 alle 20” — every day from 07:00 to 20:00. There is no Sunday exemption and no holiday exemption, which is the opposite of the pattern in most Italian cities and the single easiest thing to get wrong here. Treat the times as indicative and read the signs at the gate.

Seventeen locations are named as Sirio gates: Santo Stefano, San Vitale, Alessandrini, Marconi, Riva di Reno, San Felice, Sant’Isaia, viale XII Giugno, D’Azeglio, Borgo di San Pietro, Finelli, Mascarella, Capo di Lucca, Bocca di Lupo, degli Angeli, Saragozza and Chiudare. The Comune’s own gate register lists more camera positions than that, because several of those streets are watched in both directions, and it also lists more than thirty bus-lane cameras inside and outside the centre. A bus lane will catch you whether or not you ever passed a ZTL gate.

Motorcycles, mopeds and bicycles may circulate in the ZTL, which is worth knowing if you are touring on two wheels. That exemption stops at the boundary of the inner zones described next: two of them ban motorcycles as explicitly as they ban cars.

Four zones inside the ZTL that never open

A ZTL permit or ticket is permission to be inside the viali. It is not permission to be anywhere inside them. The Comune’s guidance to visitors is blunt about it — “Non puoi mai circolare nelle zone limitate 24 ore su 24”, and “anche se hai un’autorizzazione ztl devi rispettare queste ulteriori limitazioni”. Four named zones sit inside the ZTL and are closed all day, every day.

Zona T is Via Rizzoli and Via Ugo Bassi, monitored around the clock by the RITA camera network. On weekdays it is open only to bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles, line buses and authorised car-sharing vehicles, and — after the plate has been registered — to blue-badge, electric, taxi and emergency vehicles. An ordinary car is not on that list on a Tuesday afternoon any more than on a Saturday. Zona Università, the Belle Arti and Belmeloro blocks either side of Via Zamboni, is described by the Comune as ciclopedonale: “è vietato l’accesso ad auto, moto e ciclomotori tutti i giorni 24 ore su 24”. The two ZTL speciali — San Francesco–Pratello and Moline–Capo di Lucca — likewise ban cars and motorcycles alike, “24 ore su 24, 7 giorni su 7”, and have been sanctioning by camera since March 2022. Inside San Francesco–Pratello the speed limit is 10 km/h and pedestrians have priority across the full width of the road.

Around those sit the pedestrian areas, which are stricter again: Via Indipendenza from Via Ugo Bassi to Via Augusto Righi, Via Falegnami, Piazza Santo Stefano, Corte Galluzzi and Piazza Galvani beside the Archiginnasio, Via Azzo Gardino and Piazza San Domenico. Note that Via Indipendenza is no longer part of Zona T: since the tram works of December 2025 it is a permanent pedestrian area in its own right, with two signed crossing points where a vehicle may cut across at walking pace.

What Zona T adds at weekends is the T Days closure. From 08:00 on Saturday until 22:00 on Sunday, and on public holidays from 08:00 to 22:00, Via Rizzoli and Via Ugo Bassi are given over to pedestrians and cyclists entirely, and the pedestrianisation spreads to Caprarie, Calzolerie, Via dell’Archiginnasio, the east side of Piazza Maggiore and Piazza Re Enzo, and Strada Maggiore from the Due Torri as far as Piazza San Michele. If your hotel is on or beyond one of those streets, the route you arrived by may not exist on the day you leave.

Hotels, garages and the day ticket

If you are staying at a hotel or B&B inside the ZTL, or using a public garage or a workshop there, the property files your plate — you do not apply to the Comune yourself. The order of events is more forgiving than in several other Italian cities: you are asked to give the property your registration before you set out, but the Comune states explicitly that if you have not, “puoi farlo direttamente al tuo arrivo presso la struttura”. The property then issues the pass in person, and for a hotel that pass doubles as a day permit to park on the paid blue lines anywhere in the city.

This is where the two rules meet, and where the fine is waiting. A hotel arrangement covers the ZTL gate. It does not cover the four round-the-clock zones or the pedestrian areas — the Comune’s instruction is that if the property sits inside one of them you must ask it for the specific authorised route in and out. Ask that question when you book, not when you are already at the camera.

If you have no permit and no hotel, the alternative is the ticket. It is digital, bought from the permit operator’s site, tied to your plate — there is nothing to display on the windscreen — and it comes in a one-day and a four-consecutive-day form. The rules that trip people up are these. You must activate it before you enter and wait for the confirmation: “un ticket acquistato dopo l’ingresso non rende valido l’accesso”. After 20:00 you can only activate one for a following day, and you can correct the date or plate up to 23:59 the day before. A single vehicle may use at most three daily tickets in a calendar month, or one four-day ticket instead, and the two kinds cannot be combined in the same month. It authorises entry only — parking still has to be paid for. For a foreign plate, clear the targa italiana checkbox or the plate is stored in the wrong format and the camera will not recognise it, and if you have no Italian codice fiscale you will have to generate one to complete the purchase. Above all, the ticket is not valid in Zona T, Zona Università, either ZTLS, Azzo Gardino, the Archiginnasio area, the bus lanes or the pedestrian areas. What happens when a camera does catch you is covered in the guide to ZTL fines.

Blue badges, and why Bologna is one of the good ones

A holder of the European disabled badge (CUDE in Italy) who does not live in Bologna gets free access to the ZTL and free parking, and unlike some Italian cities the entitlement reaches into the strict inner zones as well: badge holders are on the list of vehicles permitted in Zona T, in both ZTL speciali, in Zona Università and in the pedestrian areas.

It is not automatic. You have to register the plate — up to two — with the permit operator, and the Comune allows this either before the transit or within 48 hours afterwards, quoting its own example that a passage on 25 November can be notified up to the end of 27 November. Miss that window and the plate cannot be added retrospectively and the fine stands. Badges issued by Ferrara, Forlì, Modena and Parma are already in a regional exchange with Bologna and need no separate notification.

A separate rule for older cars, tightening on 1 October 2026

Bologna sits in the Agglomerato di Bologna under the regional air plan, PAIR 2030, and those limits apply across the built-up area whether or not you go anywhere near the ZTL. From 1 October to 31 March each year, Monday to Friday between 08:30 and 18:30, diesel vehicles up to and including Euro 4 are banned, along with petrol up to Euro 2, petrol/LPG and petrol/methane up to Euro 2, and mopeds and motorcycles up to Euro 2. On the four domeniche ecologiche a month, and on days when the emergency measures are triggered by a PM10 forecast, the diesel threshold rises to Euro 5.

The date to note is 1 October 2026, when the Euro 5 diesel ban becomes a standard weekday restriction in the Bologna agglomerate rather than an occasional one. It was originally to have started a year earlier and was deferred by the conversion into law of the May 2025 Decreto Infrastrutture. Petrol tightens to Euro 3 from 1 October 2027. A particulate filter makes no difference — what counts is the Euro class printed in the registration document — and a diesel converted to run on LPG or methane is still treated as a diesel. Disabled-badge vehicles are exempt.

Separately, the Comune runs its own ZTL ambientale, which sets emissions conditions on the residents’ and businesses’ permits rather than on visitors, and which has been withdrawing them class by class since 2020. One consequence does reach visitors: from 1 January 2026 the virtual permit that let hybrid cars into the ZTL is issued only to Bologna residents and Bologna-based firms. Electric vehicles are unaffected.

Città 30, and a city full of roadworks

Since January 2024 Bologna has been Italy’s first large Città 30: the default speed limit on most streets in the built-up area is 30 km/h, with the main radial roads still signed at 50. It is a speed limit and nothing more — it does not restrict access, does not overlap with the ZTL boundary, and is not something you register for. It is simply enforced, and the Comune has published two years of casualty data defending it.

The larger practical problem at the moment is construction. Bologna is building two tram lines through the centre, and the Comune’s own pages carry a standing warning that the works “sono in continua evoluzione e generano modifiche alla circolazione” — follow the signs on the day rather than the map you looked at last month. Via Indipendenza is the clearest example: it was pedestrianised permanently for the tram in December 2025. Zona T is another — who may use its Via Ugo Bassi entry and Via Rizzoli exit has been governed since 15 July 2024 by a temporary ordinance, P.G. n. 466849/2024, issued for the tram works and the repairs to the leaning Garisenda tower.

Walking in is genuinely easy here

Bologna is the one Italian city where leaving the car outside costs you almost nothing in comfort. The centre has some forty kilometres of portici — covered arcaded walkways along the streets, now a UNESCO listing — so the walk in from a car park on the ring is sheltered from both the rain and the August sun. The historic centre is also flat and compact, which is more than can be said for Siena or Perugia.

It is also, of the big northern cities, the one where the car is least worth bringing at all. Bologna Centrale is a main hub on the high-speed line and sits just outside the viali, about twenty minutes’ walk from Piazza Maggiore straight down Via Indipendenza. If the car is for touring Emilia-Romagna rather than for Bologna itself, park it outside the ring and pick it up on the way out.