UK → ITALY Removals to Italy from the UK

The drive our routing tool records from London to Rome is 19.2 hours. It goes under the Channel rather than over it. The tunnel takes thirty-five minutes and runs around the clock, and the tachograph logs the driver’s time on the train as rest. From Calais the road heads south-east across France. It climbs through the Alps and comes down into the Po valley. There the Autostrada del Sole begins its long run past Bologna and Florence to Rome. Winter on the pass can slow the crossing; your range already allows for that.

Loading day is day one, and on this lane the first possible delivery is day 3. We quote a dedicated van at 3–5 days. We quote a 5 or 10 m³ load at 3–10 days, because it shares a van and waits for it to fill before it leaves. Our guide to part-load removals explains that trade. Rome is the example the figures use, not the only destination. The tool puts Naples two and a half hours beyond it, Bari five, and Milan six hours back up the peninsula, so ask for your own town’s range instead of Rome’s. Sicily adds the strait ferry at Messina as well.

Italian cities guard their old centres with a zona a traffico limitato, a camera-gated zone that only permitted vehicles may enter. Rome’s rules for goods vehicles show what that means for a removal. The central ZTL bars a lorry over 3.5 tonnes from seven in the morning until eight at night. The Tridente around the Spanish Steps closes to goods vehicles from half past ten. And a permit counts only once the city has issued it, not once you have asked for it. Other cities run their own versions, each with its own hours and its own fee.

So an address inside a centro storico changes the plan, and we need it at quote stage. We check the zone, the hours and where a 7.5-tonne lorry can legally stand. Then we tell you whether the delivery runs early, late or from the edge of the zone. The driver’s help is at the van; up the stairs of a palazzo without a lift is the Additional Crew add-on, arranged in advance. Narrow streets and many flights are what people moving to Italy ask us about most, after documents. A photo of the street with your enquiry answers most of it, and our page on how international removals work sets out what the standard service includes.

Milan adds a second kind of zone over most of the city. Area B is a low-emission zone that runs on weekdays through the working day. It bars the older diesels and, since the autumn of 2024, the Euro 5 ones too unless the city has granted an exemption, and it refuses goods vehicles over twelve metres altogether. A lorry that may enter Rome’s centre at night can still fail a Milan gate on its engine alone. So we choose the vehicle for a Milan address with the zone in mind.

Italy also empties its motorways of the heaviest lorries on set days. The transport ministry’s decree for the year bans goods vehicles over 7.5 tonnes from roads outside towns on Sundays, on holidays and on the summer’s busiest Saturdays. A lorry arriving from abroad with its papers in order gets four hours’ grace. A 7.5-tonne lorry sits exactly at that line. The ban therefore shapes the traffic around it more than the lorry itself, and the delivery day we give you already allows for it.

One formality can wait until the boxes are unpacked. A UK licence is valid in Italy for twelve months after you become resident; then you exchange it, without a test, through the local motorisation office.

Italy asks three things of a new resident that touch the move, and they run on Italian clocks, not ours. A non-EU national applies for a residence permit within eight days of arriving. Anyone staying more than three months registers with the Anagrafe of their Comune, the step Italians call iscrizione anagrafica. And the tax office issues a first codice fiscale, the number every lease and utility contract asks for, at a counter in person, so London cannot do it for you. Book that counter appointment for your first week in Italy, before the van is due, and keep the certificate it gives you with your pack.

The relief on your belongings follows the EU rule that Italy’s customs agency sets out in its own FAQ. Twelve consecutive months of residence outside the EU; six months’ possession and use of the goods; a declaration inside twelve months of taking up residence; alcohol, tobacco and commercial vehicles left out. The same FAQ allows the goods to arrive before you do, against a guarantee, if you undertake to take up residence within six months. That is the case where the van beats the paperwork, and it needs the customs office’s say-so first.

That is why the Italian pack carries the signed free-importation declaration with the self-certification, and why the UK side asks for its proofs together rather than one of them. We work out with you which proof of residence Italy accepts in your case once you have your quote. An Italian passport holder moving without a certificate of residence adds a Consular Certification, or one of the alternatives the list above names. How the export declaration and the import clearance then follow each other is on our transfer of residence page.

The question people ask most at booking time is whether the figure will still be the figure when the lorry pulls up in Italy. It will, because the price is built from your inventory and your two addresses before you pay anything, and it is written down. The thread further down shows how a real move on this lane was planned in the messages, box sizes and all. Among the examples we publish, a 10 m³ load London to Rome came out near £1,778, and the guide, how much does it cost to move abroad, shows what moves that figure, size by size.

The loading day sits inside the collection window your size gives you: a 3-day window on a 10 m³ load, a confirmed day on a full van. We choose the day, you hear the time ahead, and you are packed from the window’s first day. The Italian pack falls due 7 days before that window, the final inventory 3 calendar days before it. A 25% deposit holds the booking; the balance follows on loading day.

Italy stops on 15 August. The Assumption is a national festive day, set by law, and the fortnight around it is when offices, small shops and many landlords close; a delivery into a town that week may find nobody to open the door. Each Comune adds its own patron saint’s day, so Rome, Milan and Palermo each keep a date the rest of the country does not, and we check yours when we plan the delivery. September and the weeks before Easter are the easiest times to find both a road and an open office. Easter itself moves, so check the date for your year before you fix the window.

Our calendar adds two fixed points of its own. A Sunday is never a collection day, and the booking calendar already blocks the festive closure over Christmas and New Year. A lorry already on the road drives through an Italian holiday; the delivery day is what we plan around it, and we confirm the exact loading time to you before the van comes.