The Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport formally handed the Autostrade per l’Italia Group the certification that makes the A56 Tangenziale di Napoli the first road in Italy to meet the legal definition of a Smart Road under Ministerial Decree 70/2018. The recognition marks the first time Italy’s transport ministry has granted this designation, turning a busy 22-kilometer urban artery into a nationally endorsed testbed for connected and autonomous vehicle technology.
Traffic, Weather, Floods and Cars: The Three Pillars Behind Italy’s Smart Road Standard
Italy’s Smart Road framework, established by Ministerial Decree 70/2018, sets three mandatory functions an infrastructure must demonstrate before receiving official recognition. The first is active traffic monitoring, where distributed sensors continuously collect flow, speed, and vehicle classification data to support real-time decisions by control center operators. The second is meteorological and hydrogeological monitoring, requiring multiple sensors to measure weather conditions, road surface state, and water levels, with automatic alerts when thresholds that could indicate floods or landslides are breached. The third is traveler communication and connected mobility, meaning the infrastructure must exchange data bidirectionally with connected vehicles in transit.
The Naples ring road satisfied all three conditions, a bar that no other Italian road had previously cleared.
The Hardware Footprint Across 22 Kilometers
The physical build-out powering the certification is substantial. Along the full length of the route, installation is underway of 217 intelligent cameras, 15 detection portals, 8 meteorological stations, and 40 antennas equipped with dual ITS-G5 and cellular V2X communication technology. All of that field data flows into the C-ITS central platform operated by Movyon, the technology and innovation arm of the ASPI Group, where it is fused with external data sources and processed to maintain continuous traffic oversight and vehicle-to-infrastructure dialogue.
The traffic model running at the core of the system was developed jointly by Movyon and the University of Naples Federico II, which designed the mathematical engine that translates raw sensor feeds into actionable speed recommendations. In its early weeks of operation, the system was already ingesting roughly 3.5 million traffic data points per day, capturing vehicle class, lane, speed, length, and headway between vehicles.
From Trial to Benchmark: The Road to Certification
The formal certification did not arrive without substantial preparation. In spring 2025, Autostrade per l’Italia launched the first Italian trial of a Dynamic Speed Limit service on the ring road, the first application of its kind in Italy to suggest optimal speeds to motorists during ordinary open-traffic conditions rather than only in response to incidents or road works.
The most consequential trial took place on April 15, 2025, along a three-kilometer stretch between Vomero and Fuorigrotta. A Maserati GranCabrio Folgore equipped with a robo-driver developed at the Politecnico di Milano received speed instructions directly from the ring road’s control center and adjusted its velocity autonomously in real time. A supervising driver remained in the vehicle throughout, in line with current Italian regulations for autonomous vehicle testing on public roads. The test marked the first time a self-driving vehicle had responded dynamically to infrastructure-generated commands on an Italian highway in open traffic.
Movyon estimates that sustained deployment of the Dynamic Speed Limit system could reduce travel times and emissions by up to 15%, and cut accident rates by between 10% and 30%, based on international modelling benchmarks aligned with the system’s traffic-smoothing logic.
Who Handed Over the Certificate
The certification was delivered at an operational site visit by a ministerial delegation led by Undersecretary of State Tullio Ferrante, joined by Sergio Moschetti, Director General for Motorways and Concession Supervision, and Francesco Baldoni, Director General for Digitalization and President of the Technical Observatory on Smart Roads and Connected and Automated Vehicles.
The project brought together four distinct parties: Tangenziale di Napoli S.p.A. as the concession operator, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport as the regulatory authority, the National Center for Sustainable Mobility (MOST) as the institutional research sponsor, and Movyon as the technology provider responsible for hardware architecture, software platform, and system integration.
“The milestone reached today by the Autostrade per l’Italia Group is a very important result. Aware of the responsibility that managing Italy’s main motorway infrastructure entails, we are convinced it must constantly evolve to guarantee ever higher levels of safety for the infrastructure, its users, and the people who work on it every day. One of the pillars of this journey is technology: from this perspective, we have demonstrated, thanks to the synergies developed within our Group, that we can be a pioneer and laboratory for the future of mobility,” said Arrigo Giana, CEO of Autostrade per l’Italia, in the company’s June 2026 statement (translated from Italian by Kurrantly News).
What the Certification Unlocks Beyond Naples
Italy’s broader smart road agenda has been building for years. ANAS, the state road agency within the FS Italiane Group, has been developing its own Smart Road program across the national network for nearly a decade, covering IoT-enabled monitoring along a portion of its roughly 26,000 kilometers of roads. Separate V2X corridor trials under the pan-European C-Roads Italy initiative have already demonstrated interoperable cooperative ITS services on other Italian routes.
The Naples certification carries specific weight because it is the first to move from trial status to formal ministerial recognition under Decree 70/2018. That distinction matters for national rollout: it establishes a verified template that other concessionaires can now replicate, and it signals that the regulatory observatory overseeing smart road and autonomous vehicle deployment is operationally ready to assess future applications. Italy’s smart city sector has been accelerating in parallel, with infrastructure convergence also visible in urban contexts, as Kurrant has tracked in coverage of Italy’s smart urban infrastructure buildout.
The services already live on the ring road go beyond passive monitoring. Connected vehicles receive real-time alerts for construction zones, broken-down vehicles, adverse weather, and other hazards. Optimal speed recommendations are broadcast continuously to reduce queue propagation, the congestion dynamic Movyon’s system was specifically engineered to interrupt. With the full sensor and antenna deployment scheduled for completion across the entire 22-kilometer corridor, the ring road is expected to be capable of supporting a growing fleet of connected vehicles as automotive V2X adoption expands across Europe.
