Traffic tickets from Florence

Welcome!

Here is the Search result for "paying traffic fines" you should find your answer in one of these threads:
https://search.ricksteves.com/?button=&filter=Travel+Forum&query=paying+traffic+fines&utf8=✓

I assume you were not aware of ZTLs or bus lanes - but these tickets are probably legit. (I am not sure what "Netherlands registration labels" means).
Whether you pay them or not is your decision.

You are not going to be thrown in the hoosegow.

I presume you live in the Netherlands, otherwise your post makes no sense. The registered mail should come from the Polizia Municipale of the City of Florence. If not, I need more explanations.

Regarding the punishment for not paying the fine, I believe Girolamo Savonarola was caught entering the ZTL with his horse carriage and the City of Florence levied this punishment on him

I heard that fine charging and collection has done great progress within the EU, this could be a case to be observed. No risk ending up in jail, but your license plate number may end up in a list of cars to be impounded if found again circulating in Italy. A few years ago it was observed that a lot a Swiss people had not paid their Italian fines, so the list of their plate numbers was sent to border points and a number of cars impounded when trying to enter Italy.

This is why I would never rent a car in Italy.

I don’t think there is a need to go to the extreme of refusing to drive a car in Italy. I’ve driven it Italy for decades and never got a ZTL violation. All is necessary to do is to know the road signage and obey the signs. Apparently many people in this forum don’t bother and drive like they are Mr. Magoo, so they get fined. Here in San Francisco there is no ZTL but there are plenty on bus lanes. If I drive in them, I get fined. Driving in Florence, or San Francisco, is not like driving in Kansas.

This^^
Straight talk from Roberto

Thank you all for the advice. Renting a car was an unexpected emergency due to a late return flight from Sicily.

Wait a minute...

Everyone here assumed that you are from the Netherlands, and travelled to Florence with our own car.

However you now state you rented a car, so that car would have had Italian plates. So if the tickets you received are for a Dutch registered car they are not for you. Then there is indeed something odd going on.

Normally you should also have received a letter, and a bill from your rental car company, informing you that they passed your information to the policy, and billing you for that.

Wait a minute…. Indeed.

The U.S. State Department website states that Italian authorities must inform Americans WITHIN 360 DAYS OF A TRAFFIC VIOLATION OR THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS HAS EXPIRED and the fines must be dismissed.
This jogs my recollection of another recent post involving a traveler who rented a car in Italy and more than six months after they returned home to the U.S. they started getting mail from Italy stating they owed mega$$ for traffic violations.
They, too, did not receive any word from the car rental agency saying their credit card info or address had been provided to the authorities.
The poster stated the letter was not clearly from an Italian law enforcement or government agency.

Seems like this may be the new modus operandi to scam foreigners who have rented cars in Italy.

Hansart2, You’re in the clear. Case dismissed!

The law actually says that within 90 days from the date of the infraction the authorities must notify the owner of the vehicle (post stamp date). If the owner is a rental agency, the rental agency has then 60 days to communicate the name and address of the renter driving the vehicle at the time of infraction.
Once the name of the actual driver is received by the authority issuing the fine, the authority has 90 days to notify the actual driver, if the driver resides in Italy. But if the driver resides abroad, the authority has 360 days to notify the driver, from the moment they received the name from the rental agency. Therefore, potentially, if everybody communicates the notification at the very end of their limits, there could be 510 days between the time of the infraction and the time of the notification abroad.

If the renter of the vehicle never hears from the rental agency that the agency was contacted by the
authorities and the renter’s name/address was provided to the authorities— is the driver in the clear then?

If the renter receives the notifications then we can safely assume they got the name from the rental agency. There is no other way the issuing authority could know the name of the renter because all they have is the car license plate number. The rental agency may have chosen not to notify the renter they provided their name to the authorities, but once the issuing authority has the name of the actual renter driver and sends the fine to the driver, the violation becomes the responsibility of the driver regardless of whether the rental agency has done anything else besides communicating g the renter’s name to the authority. The fact that the agency did not tell the renter about the fact they communicated their name to the authority does not invalidate the fine. Of course we don’t know the exact details of this case because I’ve never heard of any Dutch entity being involved in a fine issued in Florence, but assuming this fine was issued by the City of Florence and it was received by the driver/renter, it is the responsibility of the renter to pay it. Of course the renter may choose not to pay, and if one resides in the United States there isn’t much the City of Florence can do to collect, except for assigning the debt to an international collection agency. Even in this case it would be nearly impossible for the collection agency to collect the debt, since a foreign fine would not be enforceable in a U.S. court and they wouldn’t bother to insist beyond the typical 2 or 3 letters every 30 days.

Don't think so.