Driving in Padua: Zone a Traffico Limitato Notturno

Padua, Italy · Limited traffic zone

Not in force in Padua right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:04 · Europe/Rome

  • Not in force Via Anelli and neighbouring streets — Anelli, da Peraga, Galliano, De Cristoforis, De Besi, Puchetti
  • Not in force The Pescarotto quarter and the stretch of via Mortise between via del Plebiscito and number 57
  • Not in force The Arcella block between via Jacopo d'Avanzo and via Giusto de' Menabuoi

Starts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 22:00 local time.

There is no holiday gap in this scheme, and that is a fact rather than an omission. All three zones run "tutti i giorni della settimana", and two of the three pages spell it out further as "(feriali e festivi)" — working days and holidays alike. So unlike Padua's historic-centre ZTL, where a public holiday moves the start of the day's restriction by six hours and we cannot apply that shift for want of an official Italian holiday calendar, nothing here depends on knowing whether a given date is a holiday. Every night is the same night.

This encodes three zones in one timetable, and a driver is in one of them, not in all three. A verdict of "in force" at 06:00 is right for via Anelli and wrong for the other two; at 04:45 it is right for two of them and wrong for the Arcella. Which streets you are on decides, and the street lists are in the area field above — the city names every street rather than drawing a boundary, so the question is answerable exactly, but it has to be asked.

The Arcella window is written here as one continuous span from 22:00 to 04:30, and the city writes it as two: "Dalle 22:00 alle 24:00 e dalle 0:00 alle 4:30". Those are the same period — 24:00 and 00:00 are the same instant and the city leaves no gap between them — so this is a rewriting of the publisher's form and not a change to it. It is recorded here because it is a rewriting: if a later reader compares this timetable with the city's page and finds one span against two, the difference is this sentence and not an error. The city's exact wording, including the stray semicolon it prints before the comma, is watched as a string on the zone's source.

Saturday and Sunday are treated exactly like Monday here, and for once that needs no defending: the publisher writes "tutti i giorni della settimana" on all three zones and adds "(feriali e festivi)" on two of them. This is the rare Italian scheme where the feriali/festivi distinction does not arise.

Nothing in this schedule is seasonal, and nothing in it depends on the vehicle. These are public-order zones: what decides a case is the hour, the street, and whether the driver is in one of the exempt categories or can produce the self-certification.

One street inside the Arcella zone is in it conditionally. Via Jacopo Avanzo between via A. Stradivari and via G. Storlato is restricted "fino al termine dei lavori" on the Avanzo–Stradivari roundabout, and the city does not say whether those works have finished. This timetable treats it as restricted, which is the safe direction, and the condition is watched as a string so that a change to the sentence is visible.

These three zones are entirely separate from Padua's historic-centre ZTL and from the pedestrian areas inside it, which have their own records, their own hours, their own orders and a different penalty. No authorisation for one reaches any of the others.

Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.

What applies

Padua runs three restricted zones that exist only after dark, and none of them is in the historic centre.

They sit in ordinary residential streets — via Anelli and its neighbours east of the centre, the Pescarotto quarter and a stretch of via Mortise, and a block of the Arcella north of the railway — and the city says plainly why they exist: not air quality, not the old town, but street prostitution and drug dealing, and the disorder that comes with the kerb-crawling around them.

That is worth knowing before you read the rules, because it explains every unusual thing about them. There is no permit to buy and no plate to register. There are no camera gates: the check is a police officer at the roadside, and the city names the Polizia Stradale as the authority that makes it.

And the way an ordinary visitor gets through is not a document the city issues but one you write yourself — the city's page says a driver who is not a resident may enter if they can produce a self-certification stating that they are going to a relative, an acquaintance or a business, and giving the address. ⚠️ Three zones, three different clocks, and they are not interchangeable: via Anelli closes 22:00–07:00, the Pescarotto and via Mortise 22:00–05:00, the Arcella 22:00–04:30.

Every one of them runs every night of the week, working days and holidays alike. An unauthorised entry is 71 euro plus costs. 🔑 The practical warning for a visitor is narrow but real: these are through-streets in residential districts with nothing to mark them out as special during the day, and the restriction switches on at ten at night.

If your accommodation, your host or your late booking is on one of the streets listed below, the drive that was legal at nine o'clock is an offence at eleven — and the only thing standing between you and the fine is a piece of paper you can write yourself, which is worth knowing before an officer asks for it rather than after.

Source: Comune di Padova, "Elenco zone a traffico limitato notturno", the city's…, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova, "Elenco zone a traffico limitato notturno", the city's index page for the scheme, last changed 10 December 2024. It states the purpose in the city's own words and names the three zones, which is what makes it the denominator rather than a list of examples. Read through the site's Drupal JSON:API endpoint, because the human-facing address serves an empty Angular shell

Daily charge

Nothing is sold and there is nothing to buy, and here that is not a gap in our sourcing but the design of the scheme. These three zones have no permit system, no plate registration, no portal and no counter: the ordinances grant transit to named categories of vehicle and the city's pages add the self-certification route, and neither is priced.

That is a real difference from Padua's historic-centre ZTL, which does have an authorisation with a tariff set by deliberazione di Giunta comunale n. 239 of 17 May 2023 — and it follows from what these zones are for.

A scheme aimed at kerb-crawling has nothing to sell a kerb-crawler. ⚠️ Do not read the historic centre's permit classes across to these streets: a ZTL authorisation for the centro storico is an authorisation for the centro storico, and none of the three night orders mentions it.

When it operates

Three zones, three clocks, every night of the year including Sundays and public holidays. Via Anelli and its neighbouring streets are closed from 22:00 to 07:00, "di tutti i giorni della settimana". The Pescarotto quarter and via Mortise are closed from 22:00 to 05:00, which the city writes as "tutti i giorni della settimana (feriali e festivi)" so that the holiday case is beyond doubt.

The Arcella block is closed from 22:00 to 04:30, and the city writes that one as two spans meeting at midnight — "Dalle 22:00 alle 24:00 e dalle 0:00 alle 4:30" — which is the same continuous night with the clock rolled over in the middle of it, not two separate closures with a gap between them. ⚠️ The differences are small enough to be dangerous.

Between 05:00 and 07:00 the Pescarotto is open and via Anelli is not; after 04:30 the Arcella is open and both of the others are not.

A driver who learns one of these three timetables and applies it to another will be wrong for up to two and a half hours every morning. 🔑 All three are confirmed twice over: by the city's service page for the zone, and — for via Anelli and the Pescarotto in their founding ordinances, and for the Arcella in its own — by the operative clause of the order itself.

Where those two agree they are quoted below as separate sources rather than merged, so that a change to either one is visible.

Source: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Polizia Locale, "Zona a traffico limitato notturno 'via Anelli'", section "Quando", last changed 29 July 2025. Cited for the longest of the three timetables; the other two are watched on their own pages and on their own ordinances, listed under sources

Area covered

Three separate blocks of residential street, named exhaustively by the city rather than drawn. None of them touches the historic centre. VIA ANELLI AND NEIGHBOURS, east of the centre in Quartiere 3 Est: via Luigi Anelli, via Bonaventura da Peraga, via Colonnello Galliano, via Colonnello De Cristoforis, via Benedetto De Besi and via Guido Puchetti.

Two of those are also one-way under the same order — De Besi runs from via A. Grassi towards via G. Puchetti, and Puchetti from via B.

De Besi towards via A. Grassi — and physical obstacles have been installed on parts of Anelli and Da Peraga to stop cars pulling over.

THE PESCAROTTO AND VIA MORTISE, north-east of the station: via del Pescarotto between via Maroncelli and via Friburgo, plus via Curiel, via Pastro, via Fambri, via Salvo d'Acquisto, via Campioni, via Mascherpa, via Cortese, via Godina, via Sciesa, via Verità, via Confalonieri, via Anfossi, via Tonzig, and via Maroncelli between via del Pescarotto and via Grassi — fifteen streets in all.

Via Mortise is separate and much smaller: the stretch between via del Plebiscito and house number 57. THE ARCELLA, north of the railway between via Jacopo d'Avanzo and via Giusto de' Menabuoi: via Andrea Gloria, via Agostino Fasolato, via Giovanni Storlato, via Luigi Cherubini, via Bartolino da Padova, via Antonio Stradivari, via Pietro Selvatico between via G. De Menabuoi and via A.

Stradivari, via Pietro Calzetta, via Pietro Liberi, via Antonio Smareglia, via Ruggero Leoncavallo, via Domenico Bonati, via Jacopo Da Montagnana between via G. De Menabuoi and via P. Selvatico, via Riccardo Drigo, via Dario Varotari, via Saverio Mercadante, via Stefano Dall'Arzere between via Pordenone and via P.

Liberi, via Giusto De' Menabuoi between via J. Avanzo and via G. Storlato, and via Jacopo Avanzo between via A.

Stradivari and via G. Storlato. ⚠️ That last one is the only street in any of the three zones that the city marks as temporary: it is in the zone "con validità temporanea fino al termine dei lavori di realizzazione della rotatoria all'incrocio Avanzo-Stradivari" — until the roundabout at the Avanzo/Stradivari junction is finished.

The order is from 2010 and the page was last touched in July 2025, and the city does not say whether those works have ended.

Treat via Jacopo Avanzo as restricted, because that is what the live page says, and know that this is the one line in the record with a stated expiry condition we cannot check. ⚠️ A second oddity in the same list, and it is the publisher's: the Arcella streets are lettered a) to s), and there is no r). The unlettered entry between q) and s) is via Giusto De' Menabuoi.

Nineteen streets are named; the letters would suggest nineteen; and the sequence still skips one. We have not renumbered it and we have not dropped the entry — it is listed above in the publisher's order.

Source: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Polizia Locale, "Zona a traffico limitato notturno in zona Arcella", section "Dove", last changed 29 July 2025. Cited for the longest and most conditional of the three street lists; the other two are watched on their own pages

Why there is no map here
Padua describes these three zones better in words than it draws them, and the drawings it does hold are out of reach. Every street in all three zones is named in the city's own pages and in the founding orders, down to the stretch of via Mortise between via del Plebiscito and house number 57 — that is a more exact description of the area than the historic-centre ZTL gets, where the perimeter is published only as a picture. But a street list is not a polygon, and this record does not convert one into the other: turning nineteen Arcella street names into a shape would be our drawing of where the zone ends, not the city's. ⚠️ Three map channels were measured on 2026-09-23 and none of them yields geometry. The Anelli page links to a map through cartografia.comune.padova.it, and that host's robots.txt is 26 bytes reading "User-agent: * / Disallow: /" — a complete prohibition for every agent, so the viewer is not ours to read and nothing further was requested from it. The Pescarotto order carries its map as a "planimetria allegata e facente parte integrante della presente ordinanza", which is an image inside a 427 979-byte PDF and not data. And the third channel is the old host www.padovanet.it, which every one of these pages links to for its ordinance and which returns an empty reply (B-093). The status is published_unusable rather than not_published because the city plainly does publish the geometry — it is behind a robots prohibition and inside a raster, both of which are forms of publication we cannot reuse, not evidence that the map does not exist. It would heal if the city put the three zones out as geometry on the host that is open to us, which is a different event from a robots file changing, and filing it as not_published would send a later cycle looking for something that is already there.

The authority's own map: Comune di Padova — Settore Mobilità e Traffico

Petrol standard

Emissions decide nothing here. No Euro class opens these zones and none closes them: the three ordinances grant transit by who is in the vehicle and what the vehicle is for, and the word Euro does not appear in any of them.

A brand-new electric car and a twenty-year-old petrol one are in exactly the same position at half past ten at night — both are prohibited unless the driver falls into one of the named categories. ⚠️ This is the opposite way round from most of what this site covers, and it is also different from Padua's own historic-centre ZTL, where a fully electric vehicle does enter freely once its plate has been notified.

That concession belongs to the centro storico order and not to these three. Do not carry it across.

Source: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Polizia Locale, "Zona a traffico limitato notturno 'via Anelli'", section "Chi può entrare": the list of who may drive in, which is stated by category of user and vehicle and contains no emissions criterion

Diesel standard

The same as for petrol: the Euro class is irrelevant to these three zones, because they are public-order measures and not air-quality measures. Nothing in the three ordinances turns on fuel or on emissions class.

What one of them does set in terms of the vehicle itself is size, and only for a single exempt category: the Pescarotto order lets refuse-collection and street-cleaning vehicles through subject to a weight limit of 11 tonnes and a maximum width of 2.50 metres.

That is a limit on a municipal service vehicle, not a limit a driver can bring themselves within — there is no weight or width threshold that opens these zones to an ordinary car or van. ⚠️ Padua does also sit in the Po basin, and cities around it run winter diesel bans.

We hold no current source for such a scheme in Padua, and the 140th cycle measured why: the city's new portal publishes the department's power to make those orders — "pareri su ordinanze di limitazione della circolazione stradale per contenimento dell'inquinamento atmosferico", under article 7(1)(b) of the Codice della Strada — but not the orders themselves, which sit on the old host we cannot reach.

Do not read Modena's or Lombardy's winter rules across to Padua, and do not read anything about emissions out of this record, which covers three night zones and says nothing about air quality at all.

Source: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Mobilità e Traffico, Ordinanza dirigenziale n. 260 del 12 April 2007, "Istituzione della Zona a Traffico Limitato nel comparto viario di via del Pescarotto", operative clause 3, the exempt-category list. Published by the city as an attachment on its current site

Penalty if you do not comply
€71.00 plus procedural and service-of-notice costsSource: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Polizia Locale, "Zona a traffico limitato notturno in zona Arcella", section "Sanzione", last changed 29 July 2025. The same figure and the same wording appear on all three zone pages, which is why it is recorded once for the scheme rather than three times

How to comply
  • Check the hour before you check anything else, because these zones do not look restricted. They are ordinary residential streets with no gate, no camera and nothing to read at the kerb except a sign. Between 22:00 and somewhere between 04:30 and 07:00 — depending on which of the three you are in — driving into them without a reason the city recognises is an offence.
  • If you are visiting someone, write the self-certification before you go. The city's page says a driver who is not a resident may enter if they can produce "un'autocertificazione in cui si dichiara di recarsi da un parente, da conoscente o presso un esercizio commerciale con il relativo indirizzo" — a signed statement that you are going to a relative, an acquaintance or a business, naming the address. There is no form to collect and no office to visit; it is a document you write and sign yourself, and Italian law provides for it generally under the autocertificazione regime. Have the address on it. ⚠️ Read the caveat below about where this route comes from before you rely on it as a right.
  • Expect a person, not a camera. The Anelli page states that the check on who is authorised is carried out by the Polizia Stradale, and all three ordinances put enforcement on officers under article 12 of the Codice della Strada. Nothing in the three orders sets up a camera gate. In practice that means you may drive through unchallenged and it also means that when you are challenged it is at the roadside, where the self-certification either exists or does not.
  • Bicycles are always free, in all three zones, and that is in the orders rather than only on the pages — "velocipedi" is the second exempt category in each one. Motorcycles are not named, and should not be assumed in: the historic-centre ZTL names mopeds and motorcycles among its free categories and these orders do not.
  • If you hold a disabled person's badge, you are exempt, and the badge does not have to be Paduan. The orders exempt "veicoli al servizio di persone diversamente abili con apposito contrassegno rilasciato dal Comune di residenza" — issued by the municipality of residence, whichever that is.
  • A taxi can take you in. Taxis are an exempt category in all three orders, and the Pescarotto order extends it to hire cars with driver on a service run. If your destination is inside one of these blocks late at night and you have no self-certification, this is the route that needs no paperwork from you.
  • If you are delivering to or collecting from a business on those streets, that is its own exemption — loading and unloading at the commercial premises of the comparto is the last category in each order.
  • Do not expect to park on via Anelli or via Bonaventura da Peraga even if you may enter. The city states that physical obstacles have been installed on stretches of both specifically to prevent stopping, and the same order makes via Benedetto De Besi and via Guido Puchetti one-way, so the street layout may not be the one your map remembers.
  • There is nothing to buy and nothing to register, so do not go looking for a permit. These zones have no authorisation scheme at all. A permit for Padua's historic-centre ZTL does not apply here and is not needed here.
  • If you are fined, it is 71 euro plus procedural and notification costs. The three pages state that figure identically. The orders themselves say only that penalties are those set by law, so the euro figure is the city's current statement rather than a number written into the 2006, 2007 and 2010 orders — if it moves, it moves on the pages.
Source: Comune di Padova, read 2026-09-23
Full citation

Comune di Padova — Settore Polizia Locale, "Zona a traffico limitato notturno 'via Anelli'", section "Chi può entrare": the self-certification route, the exempt categories, the Polizia Stradale as the checking authority, and the physical obstacles on Anelli and Da Peraga

Sources

Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-21.

Before you set off

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