At Rome Fiumicino a 400ml bottle of sunscreen goes through one lane and into the bin at the next. The lanes serving flights to the United States and Israel still take it off you; the ordinary departure lanes let it through. ENAC gives a hardware reason: at the checkpoints reserved for those destinations, the machines that admit liquids over 100ml are not available. What decides your sunscreen is which scanner stands in the lane you are sent to, and which software revision it is running.
The version that reached my desk this month said the change was new, that it covered three Italian airports, and that transit passengers were excluded. The first two are wrong. The third is wrong as stated, and the way it is wrong matters. ENAC, Italy's civil aviation authority, announced the change on July 27, 2025 and published the detail on August 5, 2025, covering five airports rather than three: Fiumicino, Linate, Malpensa, Bologna, Turin. The ENAC and Aeroporti di Roma pages I worked from are in Italian, and the translations here are mine.
They do not share one rule. In that August 5, 2025 release ENAC gave Linate and Malpensa Terminal 1 the same allowance, single containers up to 2 liters, with no need to separate them from your bag. Linate has one terminal, so that is the whole airport. Malpensa Terminal 2 it left on the old rule except in the fast track lane, and Turin on the new rule in fast track only, which makes the size of bottle you may carry depend on which lane you are entitled to use. Bologna is the only one ENAC describes as covering all passengers and all destinations, because every screening lane there has suitable machines. So the rule changes by airport, then by terminal, then by lane.
The transit catch is real, but narrower than reported. ENAC's release says nothing about transit passengers as a class. Aeroporti di Roma's own page keeps the old 100ml regime for two groups: flights to the United States or Israel checking in at Terminal 1, and passengers arriving in transit from non-Schengen countries not covered by "one stop security" agreements. The Schengen zone is the European bloc that dropped border checks between its members; one stop security is the arrangement under which Italy accepts another country's screening rather than repeat it. Land at Fiumicino from one of those non-Schengen countries and your liquids can still be pulled, and you will not work that out at the gate. Everyone else there has had 2 liters since July 26, 2025, and anything larger only if empty. One carve-out runs the other way and held everywhere I checked: liquids you need during the journey for medical reasons or a special diet, baby food and baby milk included, are allowed past the limit, at Fiumicino subject to separate screening, and the UK's published guidance sets the same 2 liter allowance for them at every British airport.
Those were the rules as ENAC and Aeroporti di Roma published them, on August 5, 2025 and, for Fiumicino, from July 26, 2025. They change lane by lane, and they can be taken back. I could not reach the Milan or Turin operators' own pages when I tried on August 23, so what you have just read is ENAC's account of those airports rather than the operators' current one. Confirm with the airport operator and your airline before you fly.
The limit does not come off airport by airport. It comes off scanner by scanner. In April 2024 the European Commission suspended the "EU Stamp", the EU-wide certification that a machine meets a given detection standard, for one named configuration: the HI-SCAN 6040 CTiX running detection algorithm 20-50-00, database identifier EDSCB00110. The machines stayed in the halls, capped at 330ml rather than 2 liters. That specific suspension did not stand for long: three months later the Commission repealed the decision, folding the configuration into a limit it applied to every approved C3 machine. The rule everybody packs around is a database entry. By September 1, 2024 the Commission had pushed every C3 configuration stamped before August 1, 2024 down again to 100ml, C3 being the standard a scanner must meet to screen liquids and laptops without you unpacking them. It said plainly that this was "not in response to any new threat but addresses a temporary technical issue," and that airports which already limited liquids to 100ml, or had not deployed the equipment, were unaffected. Only the airports that had deployed the scanners and lifted the limit had to put it back.
The regulation wrote down a way out and did not require anyone to take it. The limitation "may be removed," it says, once the Commission receives test reports showing that revised configurations meet the detection standards. Those reports come from ECAC, the European Civil Aviation Conference, a pan-European body of 44 states' aviation authorities, wider than the EU and separate from Italy's ENAC. May, not must. Per configuration, at the speed of a manufacturer's retest. An airport's rule is whatever it happens to have bolted to the floor.
If that sounds like a system that can only move forward, look at Teesside. In March 2023 it announced itself as the first UK airport to do away with the 100ml limit entirely, lifted to 2 liters on the strength of two C3 scanners. Its own security page, which I read on August 23, tells passengers that every liquid in hand luggage must be in a container of 100ml or less. Britain's government does not claim a single national rule: it says that at most airports the limit is 100ml, that some may allow 2 liters, and that you should check every airport on your route.
A rule that moves one configuration at a time, and can move backwards, is not something a national timetable can promise. When I checked ENAC's own passenger page on August 23 it still stated the 100ml rule in its own text, stamped last updated December 30, 2025, with the five-airport regime surviving only as a press release attached underneath. In the Commission's annual report for 2024, published in May 2026, its entire account of this episode is a single sentence, and it still calls the limit temporary.
So: the sunscreen. ENAC's advice, in the release rather than on the page you would think to check, is to consider not only the rules where your flight departs but those at the airport you return from and at any intermediate stops. That is the regulator handing you the lookup, and the bill for getting it wrong. The weakest lane on your itinerary sets your limit, and it is nearly always the way home, where you are tired and the bottle is half full. Buy it at the other end instead, unless it is medicine or baby milk, which travels with you.
