Rome's Tourism Chief Slams Florence Over Rental Rulebook

Italy's tourism minister, Gianmarco Mazzi, used a business conference in Follonica on 2 August to criticise how Florence's city administration, led by Mayor Sara Funaro, has managed short-term rentals, telling the audience his government was the first in Rome to actually put national rules around the sector.

What Mazzi actually claimed

Mazzi was responding to questions about whether the national government plans further intervention on short-term lets. He argued his administration had already delivered what previous governments only discussed for years: a national identification code system, the CIN, now applied to short-term rental listings across the country. That registry has grown past 733,000 listed properties, though roughly one in ten entries still lack full verification. Mazzi did not announce any new national measure at the event; his comments were framed as a defence of what Rome has already done, not a preview of what comes next.

Why Florence keeps coming up

Florence has restricted new short-term rental permits in its UNESCO-listed historic centre since 2023, a policy begun under Mazzi's predecessor as mayor, Dario Nardella, and continued by Funaro since she took office in 2024. The city has pushed further limits on converting residential flats into tourist accommodation, arguing the national registry alone does not address housing pressure in the centre. Mazzi did not spell out precisely which Florence policies he objects to. His comments read as a broader argument that Rome's registration framework is the substantive reform, and that local caps layered on top amount to politics rather than management.

What operators should actually watch

Nothing changes for hosts in Florence or anywhere else in Italy as a direct result of this exchange. No new fee, deadline or filing requirement was announced. What it does confirm is that the relationship between national CIN registration and municipal caps on new listings remains unsettled, and that Rome is signalling it may resist further local tightening rather than support it. Property managers running listings in Florence's centre should keep tracking both compliance with the national code and any fresh restrictions the Funaro administration proposes locally, since the two are not moving in the same direction.