Renting a Car After a Ravenna Cruise: Pickups, the Canal Ferry and Camera Gates

The checker opens at 9 on a Monday — a fair guess for walking off a ship and into a cab.

Ravenna’s Enterprise shows closed. It stays shut until 2 PM, as its page lists it.

Saturday and Sunday turn that around. Enterprise lists 8 to noon on both — a weekend disembark is the easy case, not the hard one.

On a weekday, the open counters are in Bologna, about 57.5 miles away — so the €30 airport shuttle comes back into the plan, in reverse.

Because the weekday pattern looks odd, phone Enterprise on +39 0544 193 5638 before you plan on it. If Enterprise can’t confirm a morning, collect in Bologna.

Porto Corsini and Marina di Ravenna face each other across the mouth of the Canale Candiano. The cruise terminal is on the Porto Corsini side, the north bank.

Sat-navs can send you to Via Molo Dalmazia on the Marina di Ravenna side — the wrong bank. Our station-to-terminal route stays on the north bank with no ferry.

Start Romagna’s ferry crosses the Canale Candiano between Porto Corsini and Marina di Ravenna: €3 one way for a car up to 3.5 tonnes, €1 on foot or by bike, cash or card — about US$3 for the car.

It runs continuously; the winter timetable (Sept 13, 2026 to May 30, 2027) runs 5 AM to 12:30 AM, and summer 5 AM to 2 AM. Its boats carry 15 to 18 cars, and a local paper reported queues on Easter Monday 2026 with one ferry running.

A queue on a turnaround morning is a delay you don’t need — and €3 you didn’t have to spend. Type “Porto Corsini”, not a street name, and check the map shows the north bank. Then set off.

Much of Ravenna’s historic centre is a limited-traffic zone (ZTL) watched by an electronic camera system the city calls “Sirio”.

The tourism board puts the station about 200 m from where the ZTL starts, so the old centre, mosaics included, sits behind it.

If your hotel is inside it, the hotel can send your plate to the Comune so the cameras let you through (permessi@comune.ravenna.it, +39 0544 482912); we didn’t find the zone’s hours.

Ask your hotel at booking, not at check-in. Send the plate the moment the desk gives it to you.

The US Embassy says cameras record the plate and nobody stops you; for a rental the request goes to the company, which “normally provides the name and address of the person renting the car”, and the fine can come up to 360 days later.

ACI’s fines sheet for visitors puts a ZTL entry at €76 to €306 (Highway Code article 7, paragraph 14); newer reporting gives up to €332, so budget roughly €80 to €330 — about US$90 to US$370, before anything the rental company adds. The only figure we hold for what a company charges to pass a fine on is €42.70, in the May 2018 Avis Budget Italia tariff.

Park at Via Cura or another lot outside the zone and walk in. If you can’t tell where the zone ends, assume you’re inside it, not outside.

A post-cruise rental usually ends at an airport — and Bologna’s desks are the ones that take cars late.

Enterprise’s page: after hours, leave the car in the designated airport parking and the keys in the drop box. Sixt has a SIXT area, an app check-out and a key box for returns outside its 8-to-midnight day.

Enterprise: “Vehicles can be returned outside the opening hours of this rental location” — to the drop box at Garage Stazione Centrale, Viale Pietramellara 27/A (open 7 AM to 11 PM), at no charge.

Enterprise Ravenna is the one desk on our list with no after-hours return. A car collected there and dropped in Bologna is a one-way, not a round trip, so search it that way.

NCL sells a “Ravenna & Its Mosaics With Transfers To Bologna Airport” tour, $199 an adult and $179 a child, about 4 hours 45, and warns that flight times may overlap the tour’s end.

Leave more margin than the free-flow drive suggests — allow for the A14 and the airport car park, then add an hour of your own.

The car comes to about €48 (about US$55) before the one-way charge — about €15 of that fuel, our arithmetic.

Two of you on the shared transfer and the VisitRavenna shuttle pay €100 at the “from” price. The shuttle leaves Ravenna at 3 AM, noon and 6 PM.

Noon is the useful one after a morning disembark. Miss it, and the next is six hours later — an afternoon in a station, not on a plane.

For two people flying out the same day, the shuttle usually wins. Rent only if there’s a stop on the way, or a group big enough that the fares add up to a car.

Book for the hour you’ll actually reach the desk — not the hour the ship docks.

On a weekday that probably means Bologna. The hub’s cards list every desk and phone number, and our Discover Cars review covers deposits.

Dollar figures on this page come from the ECB reference rate of Oct 2, 2026, about $1.12 to the euro. Your card company sets its own.