Italy: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Castellarano has one driving restriction on our books: the Disposizioni straordinarie in materia di tutela della qualità dell'aria… (low emission zone). What is a low emission zone?
Sources last read on 2026-09-28, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-28.
Castellarano, a municipality of 15,130 people in the province of Reggio Emilia, closes its built-up areas to older vehicles for the winter half of the year, from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027.
The ban runs Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 18:30, and it catches petrol cars up to and including Euro 2, LPG/petrol and methane/petrol up to and including Euro 2, diesel cars up to and including Euro 4, and mopeds and motorcycles up to and including Euro 2. Nothing is on sale: there is no day ticket, no charge and no payable derogation.
The fine is the national one and the order states it, a range of €168 to €679 under article 7 paragraph 13 bis of the Highway Code, with fifteen to thirty days' licence suspension for a repeat offence within two years. 🔑 The thing that distinguishes this record from the seven Emilia-Romagna orders already in this corpus is not in the act at all — it is in where the act's annex was found.
The order restricts eight named built-up areas "come da planimetria costituente l'allegato n. 1", and Arpae, the regional agency that indexes these ordinances, publishes the act and nothing else. The Comune publishes the same act — byte for byte the same file — and, beside it, the annex: "ALL 1 - Centri abitati planimetria".
This is the first record in this family whose perimeter drawing exists at all, and it exists only because the second publisher was checked. ⚠️ What the drawing gives and what it does not both need saying.
It is a readable raster map, a single 794 × 1123 pixel image, and its legend names exactly the eight settlements the order names — Castellarano, Roteglia, Tressano, Ca' de Fii, Cadiroggio, Telarolo, Montebabbio and San Valentino — so the count of places banned and the count of places drawn agree, which in the neighbouring Coriano order they did not.
But it carries no scale bar and no coordinate reference system, so it cannot put a boundary on the ground, and this project does not trace one from it. 🔑 Where the ban applies is settled on the road rather than in this record: the order delimits the eight areas "lungo le vie di accesso dagli appositi segnali di inizio e fine", by the standard begin-and-end signs of article 3 of the Highway Code, and names no street in either direction — neither as a boundary, as Coriano's order does, nor as a route left open, as Modena's and Fidenza's do.
The ban lifts on six named days — 1 November, 8 December, 25 and 26 December, 1 and 6 January — and on days when local public transport is on strike.
There is no Sunday measure and no Saturday measure, and the ban does not widen when the air is bad: Arpae's emergency bulletin, issued for the province of Reggio Emilia on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, triggers this order's slurry-spreading ban and its biomass heating restriction and nothing for traffic. A Euro 5 diesel is outside this scheme at every hour of the season.
Electric and hybrid vehicles, cars carrying at least three people, vehicles registered for specific transport or special uses, and vehicles enrolled in the regional Move-In telematics scheme are outside the ban altogether.