Monitoraggio dei ponti esistenti in Italia: obblighi, scadenze e cosa fare entro dicembre 2026

On 9 December 2024 a MIT Decree extended the experimental period of the Guidelines for the classification and risk management of existing bridges until 29 December 2026. In practice this is the second extension of the provision that came into force with MIT Decree no.578 of 17 December 2020, which in turn had made mandatory the Guidelines issued by the Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici in April of the same year. The first extension had been established by MIT Decree no.204 of 1 July 2022, which brought the experimental period from twenty-four to forty-eight months.For municipalities the cascade closes between June and December 2026. From 30 December 2026 the Guidelines become the standard framework and all managing bodies, including ANAS and motorway concessionaires, will be operating under the same technical regime.

The origin: the gap made visible by the Morandi

The collapse of the Polcevera viaduct in Genoa on 14 August 2018 caused 43 deaths and exposed a systemic issue that had remained hidden for decades: Italy had no uniform national protocol for assessing existing bridges. Each operator worked with its own criteria, its own inspection frequencies, its own intervention thresholds. In essence, there was no shared language for describing risk.The CSLP Guidelines, published on 17 April 2020 and made mandatory by MIT Decree no.578 of December of the same year, build precisely this language. What they define are six progressive levels of analysis, four risk categories and five Attention Classes. The system is designed to scale from major motorway viaducts to municipal bridges on provincial roads, applying the same logic with different levels of depth.

The 2026 deadlines

The decree set cascading deadlines based on the technical resources of the managing bodies. ANAS and motorway concessionaires had the earliest deadlines, which have already passed. Provinces and metropolitan cities are at an advanced stage. Municipalities close the calendar.For local authorities two dates remain:

• Municipalities with a population above 15,000 inhabitants: completion of the classification process by 30 June 2026
• Municipalities with a population below 15,000 inhabitants: completion by 31 December 2026

29 December 2026 closes the overall experimental period. From that date the Guidelines operate as the standard framework, with no further transitional adjustments. And this is a non-obvious point: the December 2024 Decree has already granted an extension, but the text contains no automatic renewal clauses nor any indication of a third prolongation.For a municipality that has not yet completed Level 0 (the census) the operational calendar is tight. Between awarding the assignment, site inspections, risk classification and the possible installation of sensors on bridges that exceed the critical threshold, several months can pass. The flip side is that the market for qualified structural inspection technicians is concentrated in the same time window.

The six levels, in order of depth

The Guidelines do not require instrumenting all bridges. What they define is a decision pathway where each level establishes whether and how to proceed to the next.Level 0, census. In practice this is the collection of basic registry data: location, construction typology, year of construction, materials, managing body. For many municipalities this is the first time the bridge portfolio is catalogued systematically, integrating documentation that is often scattered across different offices.Level 1, visual inspection. Here a qualified technician examines the structure and documents its state of deterioration using standardised forms. The inspection looks for cracks, reinforcement corrosion, pier erosion, the condition of bearings and joints.Level 2, risk classification. The process branches here. Risk is assessed across four independent dimensions, structural-foundation, seismic, hydraulic and landslide, each with its own weight in determining the final Attention Class, which is articulated across five levels from Low to High.And this is a point that deserves attention: two visually similar bridges can receive very different Attention Classes. A structure that appears intact but sits over a watercourse at flood risk and in a medium-high seismic zone has a composite profile that visual inspection alone does not capture.Levels 3, 4, 5: in-depth assessments and structural monitoring. These are activated only for bridges classified in Medium-High or High Attention Class: material testing, safety assessments, and in the most severe cases continuous structural monitoring. What matters is that structural monitoring is not universal but targeted.

Surveillance and monitoring are not synonyms

The Guidelines use two terms that the industry debate tends to conflate and that have very distinct operational meanings and cost implications.Surveillance refers to periodic inspections conducted by technicians, at intervals defined by the Attention Class. In practice these are scheduled observations, documented on forms. It is required for all bridges, regardless of risk profile. The cost grows with the number of bridges and with frequency, but it does not involve the installation of permanent hardware.Structural monitoring refers to sensors installed on the structure that continuously measure physical parameters: displacements, vibrations, tilts, crack opening, temperature. It applies to bridges in High Attention Class and may be recommended for those in Medium-High Class. It involves investment in hardware, installation, maintenance and a platform for managing data over time.The distinction changes budget sizing. Across a portfolio of 20 bridges managed by a municipality, a classification that identifies 3 structures in Medium-High Class produces a very specific operational perimeter: periodic surveillance on all 20, structural monitoring only on the critical structures.

The operational constraint of small authorities

The Italian state road network counts approximately 27,400 bridges, viaducts and overpasses. The 7,896 Italian municipalities recorded by ISTAT as of 1 January 2024 collectively manage many more, distributed across a fragmented local road network.Most municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants do not have a technical office with in-house structural engineering expertise. The public works office manages roads, school buildings, utilities, cemeteries, often with reduced staff. There is no prior history of structural monitoring of infrastructure, nor dedicated IT infrastructure.However, this does not reflect a limitation of the people. The technical officer of a municipality of 8,000 inhabitants knows their territory better than any external consultant and in many cases has already flagged situations of deterioration. What is missing is the formal system that the regulation now requires, and the financial framework to activate it.There is a tradeoff here that the regulation does not resolve: the obligation is not accompanied by a dedicated funding channel. For many authorities the funding comes from PNRR funds, regional grants or specific transfers, with timelines and procedures that add to the already tight technical calendar.

From census to installation

For a municipality starting now the concrete operational path is articulated in five steps.The first is to complete the census. In practice this means identifying all structures that fall under the definition of bridge, overpass or similar structure on the municipal network, recovering historical documentation that is often scattered.The second is to commission the visual inspections to qualified technicians. The problem is that demand is concentrated in a few months and commissioning timelines are affected by the saturation of the professional market.The third is to carry out the risk classification. What this concretely involves is cross-referencing inspection data with the seismic, hydrogeological and geomorphological hazard of the territory to arrive at the Attention Class for each bridge.The fourth step concerns bridges in High Attention Class and those in Medium-High Class for which monitoring is recommended: designing and installing the structural monitoring system. And this is where the technology choice matters. A traditional wired system requires weeks of site work, dedicated electrical power supply, civil works for cable routing. On a short-span municipal bridge, wired installation is frequently disproportionate relative to the structure being monitored.LoRaWAN-based wireless sensors (a low-power radio protocol designed for devices distributed across large areas) eliminate the constraint of cables and external power supply, and operate on batteries with multi-year life. Using this technology, a team of two Move Solutions technicians installs a complete system for a typical municipal bridge in a single working day. The MyMove platform aggregates data from all monitored bridges of a municipality into a single dashboard, with configurable alert thresholds based on the MIT Attention Class assigned to each structure.The fifth step is to activate the reporting workflow. The Guidelines require traceable documentation of measured parameters. Automatic report generation from the monitoring platform avoids the manual reprocessing of raw data, which is the exact point where small technical offices tend to get stuck.When setting up the measurement chain, it is best to start from the parameter that the Attention Class requires to be monitored and work back to the sensor, not the other way around. The principle is this: the datasheet resolution of an accelerometer or a tiltmeter matters less than signal repeatability under the real operating conditions of the bridge, namely vehicular vibrations, daily thermal excursion, wind.

What changes from 30 December 2026

At the end of the experimental period the Guidelines operate as the standard framework. What changes is that classification becomes a recurring activity and monitoring of critical bridges becomes a permanent function of the municipality, not a one-off deadline.For municipalities that have completed the process, the effect is twofold. On the compliance side, the authority fulfils the obligation. On the operational side, and this is the most interesting part, the authority has for the first time a measured and up-to-date picture of the state of its bridges, on which to build the three-year public works plan and maintenance scheduling.For municipalities that have not completed the process, the position becomes more exposed. Non-compliance with a technical code obligation falls on the managing body, and the authority continues to manage its bridge portfolio without structural data on which to base intervention decisions.The system designed by the Guidelines is the first national information infrastructure on Italian bridges. Its resilience in the coming years will depend on how effectively the data collected between 2025 and 2026 is actually used in subsequent planning cycles, and on how local authorities integrate structural monitoring into their ordinary asset management processes.

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