Vatican City
Cap in the app: 70 km/h.
Speed
70 km/h, Italian figures — but received into Vatican law, not borrowed from the neighbour. The state has no traffic law of its own. Legge N. LXXI del 1 ottobre 2008 sulle fonti del diritto art. 12 § 1 a) 8 lets Italian law on gli automobili e la loro circolazione apply in the state, in the version in force when the law entered into force on 1 January 2009. Codice della strada art. 142 comma 3 e) in that version is word for word today's: 70 km/h fuori dei centri abitati, 80 on the autostrada. The state is 0.44 km² within walls and has neither an autostrada nor a strada extraurbana; comma 1 gives 50 in built-up areas and lets the sign raise it to 70. Seventy is therefore the ceiling whichever of the two rows you read.
Source. Legge N. LXXI, art. 12 · Codice della strada art. 142 in the version in force 2007-10-04–2009-01-13
Dimensions — a country without dimensions of its own, and that is read, not assumed
Vatican City is the last of the material's four enclaves, and the only one where the reading ends with the law sending the reader out of the country again. That is not the same as not knowing. The difference between "we have found nothing" and "we have read what applies when nothing exists" is the whole reason this page exists.
Step one: is there a Vatican traffic law?
No. The Governorate publishes its entire body of instruments as downloads in seven categories — ordinanze, normativa-penale, normativa-personale, normativa-generale, normativa-altre-materie, normativa-sanitaria and documenti-prevenzione. The catalogue pages are empty, sitemap.xml is empty and the search function is switched off, but every file sits behind a serial number that answers with the file's real address. The whole series has been gone through. The result is 121 ordinanze and about a hundred other instruments, and none of them concerns traffic, roads, vehicle dimensions or speed. Not one.
The three instruments that come closest each say something different, and all three disclaim the question:
- Legge Fondamentale dello Stato della Città del Vaticano del 31 luglio 2026 (Leo XIV), which under its article 25 "sostituisce integralmente la precedente del 13 maggio 2023", contains no article on sources of law and mentions neither circulation nor vehicles.
- Legge N. CCLXXIV del 25 novembre 2018, the Legge sul Governo dello S.C.V., gives one directorate responsibility for "la manutenzione dei giardini, delle strade e delle fontane" and another responsibility for the Registro Veicoli Vaticani and l'Autoparco. Maintenance and a register, then — no rule-making about how one may drive or how large the vehicle may be.
- Legge N. VI del 7 giugno 1929, the public security act, and Legge N. III of the same day have a whole chapter headed ACCESSO ALLA CITTÀ DEL VATICANO CON VEICOLI. But that chapter is about permission to enter, not about dimensions: art. 23 requires a "speciale permesso" for foreign vehicles, art. 24 that the vehicle leave the state when its business is done, art. 26 introduces the vehicle register and art. 27 prohibits refuelling inside the state. Legge N. III has since 1 March 2011 been replaced in its entirety by Legge N. CXXXI, which for vehicles says the same thing in art. 13 § 1: a permit is required of anyone who is neither citizen nor resident. Still access, still no dimension.
Step two: what applies when the state itself says nothing?
Here lies the answer, and it stands in a law the Vatican publishes itself: Legge N. LXXI del 1 ottobre 2008 sulle fonti del diritto (Benedict XVI), printed in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis — Supplemento per le leggi e disposizioni dello Stato della Città del Vaticano.
The law has two distinct mechanisms, and it is easy to mistake which one governs traffic.
Article 3 is the cautious one:
1. Nelle materie alle quali non provvedono le fonti indicate nell'art. 1, si osservano, in via suppletiva e previo recepimento da parte della competente autorità vaticana, le leggi e gli altri atti normativi emanati nello Stato Italiano.
Had traffic required that route we would have no figure at all: a recepimento is a Vatican act of its own, and there is none in the published material.
But traffic does not go that route. Article 12 enumerates nine subjects that apply directly, without any intermediate step:
1. Salva specifica normativa vaticana e sotto le riserve indicate nell'art. 3, si osservano nella Città del Vaticano: a) la legislazione dello Stato italiano vigente all'entrata in vigore della presente legge, compresi i regolamenti e i trattati ratificati dall'Italia […] concernente: 1) i pesi e misure di ogni genere; […] 8) gli automobili e la loro circolazione; 9) la difesa contro le malattie infettive e contagiose.
Si osservano — they are observed. The reservations in article 3 come along (nothing contrary to divine law, canon law or the Lateran Treaties, and only what "risultino ivi applicabili"), but no act of adoption of its own is needed. The wording is inherited word for word from Legge n. II del 7 giugno 1929, which article 13 repeals and replaces, and where the same point carried the same words: "10) gli automobili e la loro circolazione".
Step three: which version, and does it match today's?
This is the one point where the row could have gone wrong, and it is worth reading slowly. The reception is frozen: it is the Italian legislation in force "all' entrata in vigore della presente legge", and the law entered into force on 1 January 2009. Today's Italian figures therefore do not automatically apply in Vatican City — the 2009 ones do.
Codice della strada art. 61 Sagoma limite is today at version 23, in force since 2022-08-06. The version in force on 1 January 2009 is version 13, in force 2008-12-17 to 2011-01-14. The two have been fetched separately and compared cell by cell:
| Dimension | Version 2009-01-01 | Today's version | Article |
|---|---|---|---|
| Width | 2.55 m | 2.55 m | comma 1 a |
| Height | 4 m | 4 m | comma 1 b |
| Length, individual vehicle | 12 m compresi gli organi di traino | 12 m | comma 1 c |
| Length, autoarticolati | 16.50 m | 16.50 m | comma 2 |
| Length, autotreni | 18.75 m | 18.75 m | comma 2 |
All five are identical. What separates the two versions are additions that go only one way and do not concern us: today's text lets through cabine allungate and dispositivi aerodinamici with EU type approval, and permits bicycle racks on tourist coaches. Neither of them lowers a figure.
The same comparison for the speed comes out the same. Art. 142 comma 3 e) in the version of 2007-10-04–2009-01-13 reads:
e) treni costituiti da un autoveicolo e da un rimorchio di cui alle lettere h), i) e l) dell'art. 54, comma 1: 70 km/h fuori dei centri abitati;
80 km/h sulle autostrade;
Word for word today's. The freeze is therefore without effect in exactly the six cells the app uses, and only once that check is made may the row be written.
The dimensions row
| Dimension | Vatican City | Article |
|---|---|---|
| Width, car | 2.55 m | Legge LXXI art. 12 § 1 a) 8 → CdS art. 61 comma 1 a |
| Width, trailer | 2.55 m | same |
| Height | 4.00 m | CdS art. 61 comma 1 b |
| Length, caravan | 12.00 m, drawbar included | CdS art. 61 comma 1 c |
| Length, motorhome | 12.00 m | CdS art. 61 comma 1 c |
| Length, outfit | 18.75 m | CdS art. 61 comma 2 |
The figures are Italy's, and that is deliberate. The difference from simply letting the Italian area answer — which is exactly what the app did before 2026-08-10 — is that the row now has a Vatican article behind it instead of a polygon that happened to stretch too far. And it has a property no other row in the material has: it cannot give a false alarm that Italy has not already given. Vatican City cannot be reached other than over Italian roads, under the same figures. An outfit warned at the Vatican border has been warned once already.
What is not claimed
Two things are deliberately left out.
No ATP cell. CdS art. 61 comma 4 gives 2.60 m to vehicles built for temperature-controlled goods. It comes along with the reception, but it does not apply to a caravan and therefore does not stand in the table — the same treatment Italy gets.
No driving prohibition — and now we know why, instead of merely lacking material. The 1929 order required a speciale permesso to drive into the state at all. That order has been replaced by Legge N. CXXXI del 22 febbraio 2011, sulla cittadinanza, la residenza e l'accesso, in force 1 March 2011. The law is published only as scanned paper, eight pages of CCITT fax without a single character encoding, and therefore stood unread for a long time. It has been read now — the pages were rendered to images and read as images, see Method. Capo III is headed Accesso alla Città del Vaticano, and vehicles have an article of their own:
ART. 13 — (Accesso con veicoli)
1. I veicoli condotti da chi non è cittadino o residente possono entrare nella Città del Vaticano previa autorizzazione.
2. La circolazione dei veicoli all'interno dello Stato è disciplinata da apposita normativa.
forbud is nevertheless left empty, and that is now a decision instead of a gap. Art. 13 is a permit requirement hanging on who is driving, not a prohibition hanging on what is driven. It catches the car as hard as the caravan, and there is no figure in it to compare the outfit's dimensions against. A forbud cell would have made the app point out the caravan as the problem when the rule does not distinguish between vehicles at all — precisely the false alarm the whole dimension guard exists not to give. The silence here is therefore not ignorance but direction.
Art. 13 § 2 moreover says something that supports the table above: traffic inside the state is governed by apposita normativa, a regulation of its own. No such regulation has ever been promulgated. The law points at a hole that the review of the Governorate's document ids found independently, and that is why the reception of Italian law is the chain the six figures rest on.
In practice nobody is going to drive a motorhome to St Peter's Square. But the app warns about what it can evidence, not about what is improbable.