Milan. Linate to the Duomo in twenty minutes, so the meeting and the flight home fit in one day.

Linate has a business aviation terminal of its own, run under the Milano Prime name by SEA Prime, with its own apron, hangars and lounges away from the airline terminal. The airport operates around the clock and does not require slots for business aviation, but aircraft parking has to be booked in advance and it genuinely runs out in the weeks that matter: Salone del Mobile, the fashion weeks, and the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. If you are travelling in one of those weeks, the aircraft is the easy part and the parking slot is the constraint.

Malpensa has the same operator's second business terminal and far more room, at the cost of an extra thirty to forty minutes in the car. Bergamo is the third choice and is often the quickest of the three if you are heading north to Como rather than into Milan. We plan the ground leg from whichever field the aircraft ends up on, and if it moves at short notice the car moves with it. See Milan Linate and the Milan private terminals for the detail.

Milan runs two overlapping restrictions and people often confuse them. Area C is the charged zone inside the old Spanish walls, the historic centre: a daily charge to enter, on weekdays between 07:30 and 19:30, with the oldest engines banned outright. Area B is much larger, covering most of the city inside the ring road, and is an emissions zone rather than a charge: older diesel and petrol vehicles simply cannot enter during the same hours. Both are camera enforced and both are suspended at weekends and on public holidays.

In practice this decides which vehicle we put on the job. A modern executive saloon or people carrier is compliant, but the charge, the registration and the entry are ours to handle, not yours, and they are part of what we quote. It also means that a driver who does not know the city will circle: the centre is full of limited traffic streets, courtyard entrances that a long wheelbase car cannot use, and hotel forecourts on one way streets where the only sensible approach is from one direction.

Milan has a small number of weeks that change everything: the furniture fair in April, which fills every hotel room in Lombardy and spills into hundreds of showrooms across the city; the two fashion weeks in February and September; the Grand Prix at Monza in early September; and, just outside the city, the concours at Villa d'Este on Lake Como in the spring. In those weeks the hotels, the aircraft parking and the good cars all go at the same time, which is a long way ahead of the event, not a fortnight before.

August is the opposite. The city genuinely empties, a great many showrooms and restaurants close for two or three weeks, and the traffic is the lightest of the year. If your business here is flexible, it is the easiest month to move around and the hardest month to find anyone to meet.