Rome to Scrap Road Tax for Most Vehicles, and the Apennines Take Stock

From 2027, the owners of about 70 percent of the vehicles on Italy's roads will no longer have to pay the annual road tax, according to The Local Italy, which reported the plan on Thursday. The measure would remove a charge that Italian households and small businesses have paid yearly, and it would do so for the large majority of the national fleet rather than a narrow category of vehicles.

In the inner Apennines the car is not a convenience but the basic unit of daily life. Abruzzo's population is roughly 1.27 million and ageing, spread across mountain municipalities where the nearest hospital, secondary school and supermarket may sit one or two valleys away, and where bus services have thinned for years. A tax that falls on the vehicle is, in these places, a tax on the ability to reach anything at all.