Florence launches FestinaLente, its first AI-powered chatbot

Florence has introduced “FestinaLente,” a new AI-powered chatbot designed to assist residents and newcomers with one of the city’s most requested services: changing their official residence. The project, launched on Thursday, September 11, makes Florence one of the first municipalities in Italy to experiment with generative artificial intelligence in public administration.

The chatbot can answer in natural language not only in Italian but also in 13 other languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. It offers clear and immediate guidance on residence procedures, including requirements, documents, timelines and ways to submit applications.

Each year, Florence’s demographic services handle more than 24,000 residence requests and receive a similar number of inquiries. The new assistant is intended to ease this workload by providing round-the-clock first-level support directly from the municipality’s website. The tool does not replace existing services, but it expands accessibility and reduces the need to search for phone numbers, send emails or wait in line.

To ensure accuracy, “FestinaLente” was trained with official documentation and procedures under the supervision of the municipal staff responsible for residence services. No personal data is required to use the chatbot, and if users mistakenly enter sensitive information, the conversation is automatically deleted within the same day.

From a technical perspective, FestinaLente is powered by AISURU, a SaaS platform designed for creating and managing conversational agents based on generative AI. Unlike a single large language model, AISURU acts as an orchestration layer that allows the municipality to integrate and test different LLMs — including those developed by OpenAI, Mistral, and Anthropic — and choose the best performer.

After comparative trials, Florence selected ChatGPT as the main engine for its strong ability to understand natural language and generate clear, accurate responses. This modular architecture reduced development time and ensured the chatbot could be trained directly on official procedures with the help of municipal staff.

The system operates without requiring personal data, automatically deletes any sensitive information entered by mistake on the same day, and stores only non-personal interaction logs for up to six months to monitor performance. For now, FestinaLente is active only in the section dedicated to residence change requests, one of the most frequently used services of the municipality.

The name FestinaLente comes from the Latin phrase “make haste slowly,” a motto used since ancient Rome to suggest that efficiency and speed should always be balanced with care and accuracy. The expression was adopted by emperors such as Augustus as a principle of wise governance, and over the centuries it has been represented with symbols like the dolphin and the anchor. By choosing this name, Florence links its digital innovation to a tradition of thoughtful progress.

The project was developed by Firenze Smart with the support of the technology partner Ergon, as part of a broader digital services program financed through the European “PN Metro Plus 2021–2027” fund.

According to the city, “FestinaLente” represents an important step in making Florence more digital, inclusive and efficient. The chatbot is now available directly from the homepage of the Municipality of Florence.

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