Florence ZTL map, hours and where to park

Where the zone begins

The boundary is the viali, the wide ring road built over the line of the old walls, plus a section on the Oltrarno side of the river. Anything inside that ring is in the ZTL. The sectors are lettered — A, B and O across the core, F and G over the Oltrarno — and they matter mainly because a permit for one does not cover the others. For a visitor the rule is simpler: treat the whole centre as closed.

The cameras sit at the entry points, usually where a smaller street meets the ring, marked with the round white sign and an electronic display showing whether the gate is live. That display is easy to miss in traffic, and a sat-nav routed for the shortest distance will send you past one without comment. Passing a gate and immediately turning round does not help — the entry is already recorded.

When the zone is live

The daytime ZTL runs 07:30 to 20:00 from Monday to Friday, and 07:30 to 16:00 on Saturday. On Sundays and public holidays it does not run at all. That last point is the one most visitors never learn, and it is the difference between an expensive arrival and a free one: a car that cannot be brought to the door on Friday afternoon usually can be on Sunday morning.

The hours describe the timed gates only. Bus lanes and pedestrian areas inside the centre have cameras of their own that run around the clock, and they do not stop at 20:00 with everything else. A street being outside the ZTL timetable is not the same as a street being open to you.

Each gate carries an electronic display showing whether it is currently active, but treat it as a courtesy rather than a safeguard. It is small, it is often obscured by the car in front, and it tells you nothing until you are close enough that stopping is no longer an option. Plan the route on the timetable instead, and if you arrive inside the hours, park outside the viali and walk. What each message on the display means — including “ZTL closed” — is set out in our guide to ZTL signs.

The Oltrarno does not follow the same rules

The sectors south of the river — F and G, over the Oltrarno — have no daytime restriction at all. They are governed only by the summer night zone below. So a street around Santo Spirito or San Frediano that you drove down at four in the afternoon in complete legality can be a restricted zone by eleven that night, in the same week, with no change to the signage you passed.

This is worth knowing in both directions. It means the Oltrarno is a more forgiving place to be staying with a car than the core, for most of the year and most of the day. It also means the Oltrarno is where the summer night zone catches the most people, because nothing about driving there earlier in the day suggests a restriction exists.

Parking outside the viali

The intended solution is to leave the car outside the ring entirely. Paid garages sit around the edge of the centre, most of them a ten- to twenty-minute walk from the main sights, and blue-line street parking is metered across the rest of the city. White lines are usually resident-only, so read the signs rather than the paint. Siena and Pisa are also ZTL cities; see the Siena ZTL map and hours and the Pisa ZTL map and hours before a day trip by car.

For a stay of more than a day, the better option is the Villa Costanza park-and-ride out where the A1 motorway meets the city. It is a large purpose-built car park with the T1 tram running from it into the centre in around twenty minutes, and it keeps you out of Florentine traffic altogether — which, quite apart from the ZTL, is worth avoiding.

If you are staying inside the zone

Hotels, B&Bs and apartments inside the ZTL can register your number plate with the Comune, authorising a temporary entry to reach the property and unload. This has to be arranged before you arrive. A booking confirmation on its own grants you nothing, and showing it to a camera achieves less than nothing.

Send the property your plate number, the country of registration and your arrival date in advance, and ask them to confirm it has been entered. If you change cars at the rental desk — an upgrade, a swap for a fault — the plate changes with it and the registration has to be updated. This is the most common way people staying legally inside the zone still end up fined.

The Scudo Verde is a separate thing entirely

Since 2025 Florence has also operated the Scudo Verde, a much larger zone covering most of the city rather than just the historic centre, monitored around the clock by its own ring of cameras. It is not the ZTL and it does not change the hours above — the two overlap and are enforced separately.

What it restricts is the vehicle rather than the hour: progressively older cars are barred by emissions class, and the thresholds tighten year by year. If you are bringing an older car into Florence — including a foreign-registered one — check whether it is admitted before you drive in, because a permit for the historic-centre ZTL says nothing about this. What a fine costs and how it reaches you is covered in the guide to ZTL fines.

The summer night zone

For roughly half the year a second, separate restriction runs after dark. The season is defined by the Comune as running from the first Thursday in April to the first Sunday in October, with the exact terms re-set each year by ordinance, so the dates shift by a few days annually rather than sitting on fixed calendar days.

Within that season it runs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, 23:00 to 03:00, and it covers the centre and the Oltrarno sectors that have no daytime restriction whatever. It catches people who have checked the daytime hours, seen that they end at 20:00, and reasonably concluded that the centre reopens after dinner. It does not. It reopens, and then closes again three hours later on exactly the nights you are most likely to be out.

The practical rule for a summer visit is the simplest one on this page: if you are driving anywhere near the Florentine centre late on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday between April and October, assume the zone is live and park outside the viali.