ZTL Florence

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.

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.

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

From early April to early October a separate night-time restriction runs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, from late evening into the early hours, across the centre and the Oltrarno. It catches people who have checked the daytime hours, seen that they end in the evening, and assumed the centre reopens after dinner. If you are driving in Florence on a summer weekend night, assume the zone is live.