Friendly Warning About Italy Toll Roads.

Thanks for providing this advice! Hopefully someone will read it and avoid the additional expense.

I hope you and your wife have a wonderful trip with no more surprises!

Thanks for the heads up. We’ll be driving to Bologna and florence in August from Croatia.

Good of you to share your "my mistake" story! We all learn from these mishaps. Could've been worse!

Duplicate credit cards charges are a routine occurrence for a credit card company. Call your credit card company to dispute the extra charges.

you should challenge this with your credit card company, they'll make at least a feeble effort to contact the Italian authorities and may decide to help you out

Contact the credit card company. This can be easily reversed as they can see the time stamp on each charge.

Thanks for the help. We will try to challenge it. Unfortunately, it went thru as a single charge we think, not multiple. All within a minute or two. Maybe we can wrestle with B of A.

Hi, your trip sounds like a great adventure! And I love traveling in Italy!

When you’re back in north Idaho, we would love to hear about it in person if you’re near Coeur d’Alene. A local group of forum participants from the Spokane/CDA area meet the first Saturdays of the month at the Woops Bakery on 4th at 10am.

I don’t know why your car rental agent didn’t suggest it or offer it but telepass is the way to go when renting a car in Italy. It’s similar to eZPass in the USA. It used to be only available is one had an Italian bank account but now many rental car agencies offer it. It’s automatic, and telepass users have their own toll lanes too

I love that you have such a good attitude about it. A funny story of "that time in Italy" ;-)

And you're so right, given the way a lot of US ticket machines operate, it's easy to see how our experience leads us to expect the same from other ticket machines.

It's too bad the machine isn't clever enough to recognize that Ticket 1234 was inserted 5 times.

I’m pretty sure you can have that reversed by the credit card.
You can calculate the toll yourself at the website below
https://www.autostrade.it/en/pedaggio

I presume your entry gate was A1 Roma Sud, while your exit gate was A3 Castellammare di Stabia.the cost to Napoli Nord is €15.30 then there is another charge at Napoli Sud for €2.30.

I prefer to use hard cash at those machines so I don’t have to deal with potential credit card snafus or similar issues like that, and automatic machines give you change too (although I preferred the manned toll booths recognizable by the white sign with a black hand holding cash). Tolls aren’t really much, so paying with cash is not a huge problem. Rome to Naples, as I said, is about €15. Florence to Rome a little over 20€. From Florence, where I usually go, the highest possible toll is to Bari, in Puglia, and it’s only about 45€ for those 500 miles, about the price of a dinner. Obviously if you plan to use the freeways a lot then it might be worth it to rent a Telepass transponder from the rental company. Telepass used to require an Italian bank account, but now they have an agreement with rental companies so you can rent it (I think Hertz calls it Telerent/Telepass) but I think it’s an extra 3 to 4€ a day to rent it (not sure about the exact amount) so if you don’t plan to use freeways a lot it’s a waste of money. You’ll end up paying more to rent the device than the tolls you’ll incur throughout your trip. Most visitors who rent cars in Italy travel on regular roads to the various little towns, so freeway driving is minimal, and south of Salerno or south of Bari freeways are free. In Sicily the only toll freeways is from Messina to Termini Imerese, near Palermo, along the north coast, all other Sicilian freeways are free.
For those driving from Malpensa to Como, be aware of the Pedemontana freeway, which is managed by another company. In that ftpreeway they take a photo of your license plate, then within a week (I think) you need to go to their website, enter your license plate with entry and exit point and pay online. So you will see no booths, but that doesn’t mean they are free.

All these are very useful tips. Is cash accepted at the unmanned toll booths?

Booths that accept cash (and cards) have a white sign displaying money above.
If the sign above the booth is blue, they accept only cards.
If the white sign has a black hand holding money, that booth is manned. Manned booths accept CASH ONLY, no cards.
If the white sign has no black hand it’s an automatic machine. They accept cash and cards.
All explanations below (in English)

https://www.autostrade.it/en/il-pedaggio/pagamento-al-casello