There are many posts when people get notified of traffic violations in Italy, and saw this on another forum.
Here is link to the US embassy on transportation in Italy. What’s interesting is the statute of limitations is 360 days from date of violation, but even after, one must still contest ticket.
We’ve been fortunate and by avoiding city centers like the plague have never received a ticket.
It's not 360 days from the date of the violation if you are a non EU citizen driving a rental car.
This sentence:
Should the statute of limitations run out the fine must still be contested before the competent Italian authorities in order to avoid payment
does not mean anything.
The author has probably heard on social-media the (wrong) intepretation given to an October ruling of the highest court. Not surprisingly, the only other mainstream source that took seriously that interpretation and wrote a piece about it is Il Giornale, Berlusconi's newspaper! Like saying «it must be true, I red about it on the DisneyLand Post».
It seems the US embassy uses unpaid traineed to write that stuff.
The only problem is that, like many similar advice pages from the State Department when talking about local laws, it is nearly right.
It is actually that amount of days after the police know who the driver was. In the case of a local car, no problem, a simple look-up. But with a rental they have to approach the owner of the car, in this case a car rental firm, and ask them for the name and address, and then the rental company has to reply. The clock starts when the reply is provided.
