Municipal road (Italy)

A strada comunale, abbreviated SC, is an Italian road that is maintained by comune, hence the name. They can be roads owned by comune or roads managed by the comune. A municipal road is less important than a provincial road.

Description

The category of strade comunali includes extra-urban roads considered to be of municipal importance, all urban roads as well as the urban sections of state, regional or provincial roads, which pass through centers with 10,000 or more inhabitants. The urban sections of state, regional or provincial roads that pass through towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants are not municipal.
Strade comunali within inhabited centers can be classified from a construction-technical point of view either as urban roads or as local roads. Extra-urban municipal roads can be technically classified as strade extraurbane principali, strade extraurbane secondarie, strade urbane di scorrimento or strada locale.
Assuming that the urban roads within the inhabited centers are all owned by the municipality, it is understood that the extra-urban roads outside the inhabited centers are to be considered municipal when:

they connect the capital of the municipality with its hamlets or join the hamlets together;
they connect the capital of the municipality with the railway, tram or car station, with an airport or sea, lake or river port, with interports or intermodal exchange nodes or with the localities that are home to essential services of interest to the municipal community;
they belong to state property or if acquired with an act of expropriation of private land.

The useful elements to assume that a road is municipal property are: its location within the inhabited centres, its name in the toponymy and consequently in the cadastral maps, its house numbering, presence of lighting and water collection, be constantly maintained by the municipal body.

Nomenclature

The municipal roads within the inhabited centers are named as via, viale, corso, piazza, piazzetta, etc. followed by a name. The names of municipal roads within inhabited centers are shown on rectangles, standardized by the Italian Highway Code, with a white background.
Extra-urban strade comunali may be identified by a number. In road signs and maps the number is preceded by the acronym SC, an acronym for strada comunale. In road signs the alphanumeric acronym is enclosed in a white rectangle with a black acronym. Very rarely extra-urban strade comunali are marked with a number and with the abbreviation SC.

Other Italian roads

Autostrade of Italy
State highways
Regional road
Provincial road