Driving in Lake Como: ZTLs, Parking and the Road Works

Varenna is the strictest place on the lake and the comune says so in its own words: the ZTL is permanent, active seven days a week, holidays included. There is one gate, in Piazza San Giorgio. Accommodation is required to enter guests' plates at the time of booking, or within 24 hours of the entry; a guest without a red tag may enter on proof of the booking, and where the property has no private parking the permit covers 30 minutes to unload luggage.

The 2026 permit fees are published: green free for residents, €10 for tenants and business owners, red for hotels at €30, and yellow for trades at €80 a year or €5 a day, with the application window having run from 19 December 2025 to 17 January 2026.

Bellagio: three zones, longer hours than people remember

Bellagio has three zones and the 2026 hours are dramatically longer than the ones people remember. The Borgo zone runs from 1 April to 31 October every day, and on Sundays and pre-holidays from 1 November to 31 March, with a permit required 00:00 to 05:00 and 09:40 to 24:00. Loppia runs daily from 1 April to 31 October, 00:00 to 06:00 and 10:00 to 24:00.

Pescallo runs daily over the same season, and from 23 June 2026 in three bands, 00:00 to 06:00, 10:00 to 18:30 and 18:30 to 24:00. Compare the 2021 regime, which was simply 10:00 to 18:30. Permits go through the comune's Polizia locale portal, which requires an Italian digital identity, and you must select the correct gate: asking for gate 2 means also selecting gate 1.

The procedure can take up to 30 days.

Menaggio: open midweek, shut on a holiday morning

Menaggio is the friendliest of the four and the shape of its rules is genuinely counter-intuitive. A permit is required Monday to Saturday 00:00 to 10:00, 12:00 to 16:00 and 18:00 to 24:00, and on holidays 00:00 to 16:00 and 18:00 to 24:00. Read that carefully: the zone is open in the middle of a working day and closed on a holiday morning.

Permits are free, permanent or temporary, and a late regularisation is possible within three days. Hotels send the day's plate list daily; taxis and hire cars with driver enter free. Vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, mopeds and motorcycles are banned inside the zone.

Como and Tremezzina

Como publishes no blanket window at all, only hours per permit category, which makes it the hardest to summarise honestly. The zone covers the whole walled city plus Piazza Roma and Piazza Verdi, and Piazza Volta with Via Grassi and Via Garibaldi, under Ordinanza 11/2017. A dedicated hotel-guest permit exists, applied for online only, costing a €16 digital stamp duty plus €5 to €20 handling and allowing 120 minutes inside the zone.

Vehicles over 3.5 tonnes need a separate authorisation from the technical office. Tremezzina, meanwhile, publishes no ZTL: on the published record, the Villa Carlotta and Balbianello shore is ZTL-free, which is a genuine advantage for anybody driving to Villa Carlotta or Villa del Balbianello.

No comune on Lake Como publishes a euro figure for a plain ZTL violation. Not Como, not Bellagio, not Varenna, not Menaggio. Varenna's disciplinare refers to the penalties in the Codice della Strada without printing an amount.

Menaggio is the only comune that prints a range at all, €25 to €500, and it applies specifically to conduct the Codice della Strada does not already cover, which is not the same thing as driving through a gate.

The Bellagio figures that appear all over the internet, a €90 fine and a 24-hour plate registration window, are not confirmed by any comune page. Bellagio's permit portal sits behind a login and its ZTL regulation PDF is served through a link that does not resolve. So those numbers may be right, and no official source we could reach says so.

For comparison, the transport fines that are published are precise: on a bus, €25 paid on the spot rising to €165 after 60 days; on a train, €47 within 5 days, €62 within 60 and €162 by injunction. Those are on getting around Lake Como. The contrast is the point: the operators publish their penalties, the comuni do not.

The structures, as published, with what each one means when you are standing at the machine. Standard paid hours are 08:00 to 19:00 at most meters, with a maximum stay of 11 hours, and almost nothing is free on a public holiday.

The other structures, and the summer rule

Two further structures exist: a first hour at $0.58 (€0.50) then $1.17 (€1) an hour at 18 meters, and a first 30 minutes free then $0.58 to $1.17 at 10 meters, plus flat multi-hour packets at 18 more. One outlier is worth naming for its sheer oddity: meter 189 on Via Regina Teodolinda charges $11.65 (€10) an hour. The summer rule catches people out too: from 1 May to 30 September, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, payment runs to midnight at Viale Geno, Piazzetta Baratelli and Piazza Croggi.

In total the comune counts 3,942 car spaces, 5 camper spaces and 19 coach spaces.

The covered alternative

The covered alternative is the SPT autosilo on Via Castelnuovo: 440 spaces on three levels, open 24 hours, maximum height 2 metres, at $0.58 (€0.50) for the first half hour then $1.17 (€1) an hour, capped at $3.50 (€3) within each of the 07:00 to 13:00, 13:00 to 19:00 and 19:00 to 07:00 windows, with a flat $2.33 (€2) on Sundays from 07:00 to 19:00. A lost ticket costs €20. Neither the on-street schedule nor the autosilo table prints a validity date, and neither hosting page states one, so both should be checked at the machine.

Our pick

Our pick for anybody arriving by car and intending to use the boat is Lazzago or the Tavernola bays at $1.17 (€1) a day. It is the same Via Colombo site that the airport coach uses as its Como Grandate stop, which makes it a real interchange rather than a car park at the edge of town. There is also an annual pass at $407.80 (€350) that includes the urban bus subscription, which is only relevant to a long stay.

Four zones, with the structure charging less in a garage than on the street, which is the opposite of most Italian towns and worth exploiting.

Zones C1 and C2 are charged until midnight in high season, 1 April to 31 October, and until 20:00 in low season, 1 November to 31 March. The hospital car parks give the first 30 minutes free. The park and ride structures by the railway station carry a deliberately low tariff reserved for public transport season-ticket holders, and the exact figure is not stated in the 2026 schedule.

Individual barrier car parks vary: the Autosilo Ponte Vecchio is $0.58 (€0.50) an hour and $11.65 (€10) a day with entry 07:00 to 22:00 and exit around the clock, while Via Nava and Piazza Sassi are $2.33 (€2) an hour and $16.31 (€14) a day.

The pattern is the same in all three of the paid-all-day towns: about €2 for the first hour, €13 to €15 for a day, and enforcement from 08:00 to 20:00. The column that decides a day out is the last one.

Two of these are worth planning around. Bellano issues a guest pass through your host, $64.10 (€55.00) for seven consecutive days or $35.00 (€30.00) for three, valid in every paid car park against one plate, which is the cheapest week of parking published anywhere on this lake. Colico sells annual permits from €10 for residents to €150 for a non-resident with no local tie, and none of them is valid in Piazza Roma. Colico also raised its rates on 2 March 2026, so the €1.00 and €6.50 figures still circulating on aggregator sites are the old ones.

Brunate is the one where the arithmetic decides the mode: a day in a paid car park up there is €15.00, against €14.80 for two adults riding the funicular up and back, so the car only wins if you are carrying gear or arriving after the last car at midnight.

What each of them does publish instead, checked on the comune's own pages:

• Bellagio: permit forms only, through the Polizia Locale at Via Garibaldi 1. Resident, motorcycle, disabled badge and driveway permits, with no deliberation and no concessionaire tariff schedule anywhere on the site.
• Varenna: ZTL and parking permits, with a €16 stamp duty and a fee the comune says varies by permit type, vehicle and, where relevant, means test, without stating any amount. The private site parkvarenna.it does not resolve.
• Menaggio: a residents' parking tagliando at €30 a year for Largo Fossato and Via per la Grona. Its only other parking act, from 2006, covers the town hall car park for councillors and staff.
• Tremezzina: the car parks are named and the prices are not. The comune's own Villa del Balbianello page points to the Parcheggio Mercato in Via Comoedia at Lenno, with more parking in Via Diaz and Via Silvio Pellico, and a news item of August 2025 records a new Via Volta car park with 19 car and 3 motorcycle spaces. No rate is published for any of them.
• Nesso: the residents' scheme and nothing else. The comune assigns 60 municipal spaces on five-year administrative concessions and publishes no hourly, daily or blue-bay rate.
• Laglio: no visitor tariff at all. What exists is a residents' reserved-bay regulation allowing up to 40 per cent of on-street spaces to be yellow-lined and reserved 17:00 to 08:00 on weekdays and all day at weekends, with the annual permit fee set by the Giunta and unpublished. The comune also bans stopping and loitering near one famous villa's entrance.

Cernobbio used to belong on this list and no longer does: its concessionaire ABACO charges €1.50 to €2.00 an hour by zone with a €0.50 minimum for 30 minutes, three hours maximum in the central rotation zone, and €3.00 for a whole day at the Villa Erba car park, on hours that run 09:00 to 19:00 from October to May and to midnight in the central zone from June to September. The rules sit alongside a Regolamento Z.T.L. e Aree Pedonali approved by council deliberation 39/2025, and the comune's disabled-badge page adds a free Wednesday morning from 07:00 to 14:00. The published rates are in the table above.

The practical consequence: budget for parking in those six as an unknown, arrive early, and treat any per-hour figure you find in a blog as unverified. If the day's target is on the west shore, the boat removes the problem, and if it is Bellagio or Varenna, the car is close to a liability.

The SS340 Regina runs the west shore from Como through Argegno and Menaggio to Sorico, and it is the road the Variante alla Tremezzina is being built to relieve, between Colonno and Griante. The total handover was signed on 22 March 2023 and the works notice states an end of works of 10 April 2028, with over 200 workers on site as of 9 July 2026. A standing seasonal ordinance regulates traffic from 15 March to 15 November every year.

Since 16 March 2026 a mixed traffic-light management trial has run between Colonno and Griante, with traffic observers on the Colonno to Ossuccio stretch extended to Saturdays from 2 May 2026.

Two further restrictions are on the record. A 2023 order banned heavy goods vehicles over 9.10 metres from 3 April to 31 October, running 06:30 to 14:00 from Ossuccio towards Colonno and 14:00 to 19:30 in the other direction; whether that order is re-issued each season is not stated. And there is a precedent for a full closure: Colonno was shut from 09:30 on 29 November 2021 until 17:00 on 29 March 2022.

The SP14 diversion by way of San Fedele Intelvi and Porlezza bans trucks over 12 metres, 24 tonnes and 3.80 metres.

The SS36, the fast road from Milan up the eastern side through Lecco to Colico, is the other half of the picture and there is nothing published about it. No official descriptor, no length, no tunnel count, no current works notice from any reachable source, and nothing on the regional viability portal. That silence is itself informative: it is the road that behaves, and the one that does not is the west shore.

The traghetto runs between Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Menaggio and Varenna and nowhere else, and it is the only way to move a vehicle between the shores without driving to the bottom of the lake and back up. A car under 3.50 metres crosses for $11.77 (€10.10) with its driver, a car of 3.50 to 4.50 metres for $14.80 (€12.70), a camper for $21.60 (€18.50), on the vehicle tariff valid from 1 April 2026. Passengers riding inside the vehicle pay the ordinary passenger fare on top.

Journey times are 10 minutes from Cadenabbia to Bellagio and 15 minutes across to Varenna.

One live restriction applies. A notice of 6 August 2026 limited boarding to vehicles up to 100 quintals gross, that is 10 tonnes, because of low lake water, against the usual 400-quintal limit. That is comfortably above a family car and squarely relevant to a large campervan.

The full vehicle tariff and the ferry's own timetable windows are on the Lake Como ferry page.

A camera. Assume every historic centre on this lake has one, give the hotel your plate before arrival even where the comune does not require it, and if you realise you have driven through a gate, tell the accommodation the same day: Menaggio, for one, allows a late regularisation within three days. Do not rely on a fine amount you read online, because no comune publishes one.

A closed or crawling road. The west shore is the risk and the SS340 works are the reason. The alternatives are real: the car ferry across the middle of the lake, the C110 bus if you can leave the car, or the railway on the east shore.

All three are on getting around Lake Como.

A full car park in a town that publishes no tariff and no capacity. The honest answer is that in Bellagio, Varenna, Menaggio and the Tremezzina villages nobody publishes how many spaces exist or what they cost, so the only defence is arriving early or not arriving by car at all. On a summer Saturday, the boat from Como or a guided day with the transport included will beat the car park hunt every time.