Italy’s national traffic coordination centre, Viabilità Italia, has issued its first ‘orange-red’ bulletin of the season ahead of the long weekend of 17–20 July. The agency projects that outbound holiday traffic (“esodo”) and return flows (“contro-esodo”) will converge, producing the summer’s first critical congestion nodes on the A1 Milan-Naples, the A14 Adriatica toward the Riviera, and the A4 Venice-Trieste routes. Authorities will activate dynamic lane reversals, ban HGVs during the busiest hours, and step-up roadside assistance patrols. Motorway operator Autostrade per l’Italia has already removed 550 construction sites and will suspend an additional 300 between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. Travellers are urged to travel at off-peak hours, use the “Muoversi in Italia” app for real-time updates, and carry water as temperatures are forecast above 35 °C in the Po Valley and along both coasts. For corporate mobility managers the bulletin means factoring longer buffer times into airport or port transfers—especially for employees transiting through Fiumicino, Malpensa and the ports of Genoa and Ancona, which sit on the affected corridors. Relocation providers are advising assignees with lease hand-overs on 19 July to reschedule, as removal trucks may be caught in tailbacks. The warning also interacts with rail and local-transport strikes scheduled for the following week (see separate story), making multimodal contingency planning essential. Companies with duty-of-care programmes should push itinerary alerts and remind travellers of Italy’s mandatory reflective-vest and warning-triangle rules in case of breakdowns.
Source: L’Automobile/ACI
