How many hours a day can a van deliver in an Italian historic centre? The rules of ten cities

A van of up to 3.5 tonnes carrying non-perishable goods gets a median of four and a half hours on a weekday to work inside the historic centre of an Italian city that regulates goods vehicles with a time window. The range runs from 1.5 hours in Florence to 5.5 in Brescia: 3.7 times as much time for the same job. In four of seven cities those hours are split into two separate blocks, and the shortest block lasts one hour.

Three of the largest cities in the sample write the rule the other way round. Turin, Rome and Milan set a ban, the hours when the van may not enter, and leave the rest of the day open: between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. that leaves 11 to 12 hours.

Many Italian historic centres sit inside a ZTL (zona a traffico limitato), a limited traffic zone with camera-controlled gates where only authorised vehicles may enter. Each municipality writes its own rules for goods vehicles, in its own ordinances. The figures below come from reading those ordinances one by one, plus a calculation of how many deliveries fit into the hours they allow. Everything needed to redo the calculation is at the end, city by city. The scope is Italian, and so are the rules.

We measure a single vehicle profile, and it has to be stated before anything else: a van of up to 3.5 t, Euro 6 diesel, non-perishable goods, own-account transport, holding the ordinary goods permit wherever the city requires one, Monday to Friday. A window without the vehicle it applies to means nothing: in Verona the same historic centre gives this van 4.5 hours and a refrigerated van 12. The refrigerated reading comes further down.

Two regimes that do not belong in one column

The ten cities in the sample regulate goods vehicles in two different ways.

Seven set a window: goods vehicles may enter during certain hours and are banned outside them. These are Florence, Bari, Naples, Verona, Bologna, Lecce and Brescia. Three set a ban: goods vehicles may not enter during certain hours and circulate freely the rest of the time, with a permit or a charge where required. These are Turin, Rome and Milan.

Putting the two in a single ranking would produce a striking number that is simply wrong. The longest ban in the sample (Turin, three hours) still leaves almost a full day, while the widest window (Brescia) leaves less than half of one. So we measure them separately: for the window regime we count the hours written in the rule, for the ban regime the free hours between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., the conventional operating day of this study (the earliest window in the sample opens at 5:30, and the daytime ZTLs of Florence, Rome and Bologna close at 8 p.m.).

OD stands for ordinanza dirigenziale, an executive order signed by a municipal department head; DGC and DGCa are city executive resolutions.

What the window regime looks like

Across the seven window cities, for the study’s van:

• daily window: minimum 1.5 hours (Florence), median 4.5, maximum 5.5 (Brescia);
• ratio between the widest and the narrowest: 3.7;
• blocks: four cities of seven split the window in two (Bari, Naples, Lecce, Brescia); Florence, Verona and Bologna’s Zone T have a single block;
• shortest block: one hour, in Lecce, from 3 to 4 p.m.;
• share of a shift: the median window covers 58% of a 7.8-hour shift, which is the 39-hour week of non-intermittent staff under Italy’s national logistics labour agreement spread over five days. In Florence the share drops to 19%;
• mandatory exit: two cities give a margin to leave after the window closes (Brescia 15 minutes, Bologna’s Zone T half an hour), while Verona and Florence make the end of the window the deadline to be out. Bari, Naples and Lecce say nothing about leaving.

Parking rules tighten things further. In Bari each stop lasts at most 20 minutes, with a parking disc. In Verona free parking in loading bays is limited to 15 or 30 minutes. Florence allows “the time strictly necessary”, Rome 30 minutes with a parking disc.

Florence deserves a closer look. Its daytime ZTL switches on at 7:30, and a van of up to 3.5 t may circulate “until 9:00” (sheet 3.2 of the regulation): an hour and a half inside the controlled period. Before 7:30 the ZTL is off for everyone, so a driver entering at 6 effectively has three hours. Even counting them, Florence remains the narrowest window in the sample. Naples raises the same point: its ordinance sets goods hours of 8–10 and 14–16, but the main Centro Antico gates are only active from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For a planner, two blocks in the same centre mean two time windows on every customer inside the ZTL. To check whether your current routing engine can express that, the constraint check for OptivoRoute, Optivo’s route optimization software, lets you tick your own constraints, including multiple windows on the same customer, and shows in two minutes which ones are already handled, with no sign-up.

What splitting the window costs

Four hours in one block and four hours in two blocks of two are not the same thing. Every block costs an entry and an exit: the time from the gate to the first stop and from the last stop back to the gate. With two blocks you pay it twice, and the tail end of each block that is too short for a full delivery is lost.

To measure it we counted how many deliveries a van completes within each city’s actual blocks, and how many it would complete in the same hours laid end to end. Three timings have no precise public source, so we varied them across a plausible range and redid the count over thousands of combinations: dwell time per delivery (10 to 30 minutes, with 15 as the central value, the reference used in the Italian transport ministry’s urban logistics guidance), walking or driving time between stops inside the centre (2 to 6 minutes), and access time per block, gate to first stop and last stop to gate (10 to 30 minutes).

The range in brackets covers eight combinations out of ten.

In the four two-block cities a van loses between 9% and 14% of its deliveries compared with the same hours in a single block (typical case), and a quarter in the unfavourable case for Bari and Naples. The clearest comparison is Lecce against Verona: Lecce has half an hour more window, but split in two, and the van completes the same number of deliveries. Bologna gets one more delivery than Verona from the same 4.5-hour window because it allows half an hour to leave.

The absolute number of deliveries depends almost entirely on dwell time: moving it from 10 to 30 minutes cuts the sample’s deliveries by nearly two thirds. The share lost to fragmentation depends mainly on access time instead, ranging from 8% to 17% between 10 and 30 minutes per block. Time between stops matters little for either measure.

When there are two blocks of different length, stop sequencing stops being a question of proximity. City-centre deliveries have to land in the right block, the rest of the route is built around them, and a delay in the first block carries over into the second.

Loading bay capacity under the Italian ministry’s formula

On 28 October 2026 Italy’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport (MIT) published an operational guide to urban logistics in SUMPs, dated 23 October. It exists because of the TEN-T Regulation (EU) 2024/1679, which sets requirements for the sustainable urban mobility plans of the urban nodes on the trans-European network, urban freight included. Under Directorial Decree 213 of 16 June 2026, nodes whose plans lack the minimum logistics content must adopt an “Integration to the SUMP” by 30 September 2027. Among the things the guide asks cities to map are ZTLs with their gates, loading time windows and permit criteria.

The guide assigns a loading bay a conventional capacity of 30 deliveries a day, derived from 15 minutes per stop in a four-hour peak window. For zones where access is only allowed during certain hours it proposes a different formula: bay capacity is 60 × H / 15, where H is the window in hours, capped at 30.

Applied to our sample, the formula gives 6 deliveries per bay per day in Florence, 16 in Bari and Naples, 18 in Verona and Bologna, 20 in Lecce and 22 in Brescia. None of the seven window cities reaches the standard capacity. The comparison has a limit worth stating: the ministry’s formula is a planning parameter for estimating a logistics pressure index, and the 15 minutes is a reference value, not a measurement. We cite it as a point of comparison, not as a check on our own figures.

The second reading: perishable or refrigerated goods

For an insulated or refrigerated van the map changes in three cities out of ten.

• Verona issues a dedicated permit for perishable food carried in vehicles with an ATP certificate (the international agreement on perishable foodstuffs): 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day. That is 12 hours, against 4.5 for the ordinary van.
• Naples explicitly excludes “vehicles carrying perishable goods” from the window; they enter with a permit throughout ZTL hours.
• Milan exempts insulated or refrigerated vans from the 8–10 ban, as well as vehicles of registered for-hire hauliers.

Two cities widen the window for medicines only. Florence lifts all time limits for vehicles carrying medicines (and for electric vehicles), but not for food. Lecce, which on 1 January 2026 revoked every permit issued under its previous rules, kept its LOG-D permits for medicines and perishables in force; the ordinance does not say whether they carry different hours.

In the other five, a refrigerated van has the same window as the ordinary one. In Rome the official mobility agency page says so explicitly: the time limits also apply to Euro 6 vehicles “with insulated bodywork”.

Why this calculation is hard

Beyond the hours themselves, each city differentiates its windows along a criterion of its own.

We note this as an observation, without counting the criteria as if they were a measurement. What matters is the practical consequence: an operator delivering in several cities has to work out, vehicle by vehicle, which of ten different logics decides the timetable that applies.

There is also a problem of access to the data. None of the ten cities publishes its goods windows in machine-readable form: Milan publishes its ZTLs as open data under an open licence, but the loading hours are not in the dataset. The hours sit in ordinances, technical regulations and the pages of permit agencies, with rules dating from Turin’s 2010 order to Lecce’s 2025 one. In an initial scan based on web pages and online guides, three cities out of ten had the wrong rule attached and two had hours that the rules do not contain: Verona had picked up, word for word, the time slots of Venice-Mestre. That is why this study cites the rule itself, not the page that summarises it.

What follows for route planning

A route built last year and repeated every morning accounts for a single time window, the one the planner had in mind when it was drawn. In this study’s data the windows come in one or two blocks, of different lengths, with or without an exit margin, and they change with the vehicle and the goods. An operator serving Bari and Verona with the same van has two centres with nearly the same hours, and completes 11 deliveries in Verona where it completes 8 in Bari.

The consequences show up at three points of the route:

• which vehicle goes into the centre, because the same centre may have different windows for an ordinary and a refrigerated van;
• when it goes, because a one-hour block only works if the city-centre stops are few and close together;
• what happens if the first block slips, because the second, where there is one, falls in the afternoon and drags the rest of the day with it.

The method for building routes on constraints like these is in our guide on how to optimize delivery routes. How time windows are handled in day-to-day planning is covered in the article on managing delivery time windows. The wider picture of Italian urban rules in 2026, from low-emission zones to the postponed Euro 5 ban, is in the piece on ZTL, LEZ and urban deliveries. What a delivery that fails because of a missed window costs is estimated in the article on the cost of a failed first delivery attempt.

Stated limitations

The assumptions that weigh most, one by one, with the effect they would have if they were wrong.

• We measure the written window. Where the ZTL switches off for part of the day, a driver entering outside those hours gets more time: Florence goes from 1.5 to 3 hours counting the morning before 7:30, and in Naples the main Centro Antico gates are active from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The median of the window regime would stay at 4.5 hours even counting those hours in Florence and Naples; the minimum would rise to 3.
• Three cities are silent on exit. Bari, Naples and Lecce set no mandatory exit time. We assumed the van must be out when the window closes. If the rule only governed entry, deliveries in those cities would rise: Bologna, which allows half an hour to leave, completes one more delivery than Verona with the same window.
• For Bologna we measure Zone T. The city’s table sets hours for the inner zones with particular restrictions, not for the whole ZTL. In the rest of the ZTL the goods permit has no published time slot, and we have not verified that against a formal rule.
• Verona and Brescia have no numbered rule. For Verona the hours come from the permit pages of AMT3, the company that issues permits for the city; the underlying 2014 order is not published online. For Brescia the time-slot document comes from the city but carries no number or adoption date.
• Rome’s new rule is suspended. Ordinance 105 of 31 July 2026 on goods vehicle access to the Tridente ZTL has been suspended by the Lazio regional administrative court (TAR), and the previous bans remain in force until it rules. If the court upheld it, goods vehicle rules in the Tridente would change. Resolution 245/2011, which sets the time slots, can no longer be downloaded from the agency’s site: we take the bans from its official page, last updated on 7 July 2026.
• The free hours of the ban regime depend on the reference day, which here is 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. With a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. day they become 9 in Turin, 10 in Milan and 10.5 in Rome: still at least twice the median window.
• The delivery count rests on three timings that no Italian public source provides: dwell time, time between stops and access time. Absolute deliveries depend almost entirely on dwell time (from 41 to 108 deliveries across the seven cities between 10 and 30 minutes), the fragmentation loss on access time. That is why the text puts more weight on the comparison between cities than on the absolute numbers.
• The sample is not statistical. These are the ten cities of the initial scan, large and mid-sized provincial capitals in the North, Centre and South. Venice was left out: its time slots only entered the work by mistake, attributed to Verona.

We reread the rules once a year. The date of each rule is in the opening table, the date of our reading in the next section: today it is the same for every city, and it will diverge the first time a city changes its rules. We do not promise an automatic check: some of the municipal sites in the sample block automated downloads.

Method and sources

For each city we read the rule or official document that sets the hours for goods vehicles, and extracted the start and end of each block, the days, the vehicles it applies to, any exit deadline and parking limits. All sources were read on 5 November 2026 and are in Italian.

1. Florence, ZTL technical regulation, PD 2011/M/04192, consolidated text approved by PD 2020/M/00460, art. 3 and sheet 3.2.
2. Bari, Executive order 2023/00181 of 18 January 2023, point 17, cross-checked against the ZTL rules published by AMTAB, the city transport company.
3. Naples, Executive order 333 of 28 December 2015, in force since 2 February 2016.
4. Verona, AMT3, loading permit and perishable food permit.
5. Bologna, City of Bologna, time slots for operational permit holders in zones with particular restrictions.
6. Lecce, Executive order 1689 of 17 July 2025, implementing city resolution 280 of 10 July 2025.
7. Brescia, City of Brescia, time slot regulation for loading and unloading in the ZTL.
8. Turin, City of Turin, Central ZTL information sheet.
9. Rome, Roma Servizi per la Mobilità, goods distribution in the ZTL and note on the suspension of ordinance 105/2026.
10. Milan, City of Milan, Area C exemption for goods transport 8:00–10:00 and Area C page.
11. MIT, Technical Mission Structure, Operational guide to urban logistics in SUMPs, 23 October 2026, section 6.3, and Directorial Decree 213 of 16 June 2026, art. 2.
12. Reference shift, the 39-hour week of non-intermittent staff, from the labour cost tables of Ministerial Directorial Decree 135 of 19 December 2025.

The delivery count does one thing: for each city it counts how many deliveries fit into the blocks, allowing one entry to and one exit from the ZTL per block and discarding the tail that is too short for a full delivery, and compares the result with the same hours in a single block.

To cite the study, use this line.

Optivo, “How many hours a day can a van deliver in an Italian historic centre? The rules of ten cities”, 5 November 2026, optivologistics.com/en/blog/delivery-windows-italian-city-centres-ztl/.

Frequently asked questions

The next step

If your city-centre deliveries run through more than one of these cities, the starting point is knowing which of your stops fall inside a ZTL and under which window. To see how a route is built on split windows that differ by vehicle and goods, starting from your own orders, talk to our team.