Rome. Thirty minutes from Ciampino to the centre, with every drop off planned around the old city.

Ciampino is the airport almost every private flight to Rome uses. It has a general aviation terminal of its own with customs and immigration in the building, and passengers are usually out of it in ten to twenty minutes. The drive into the centre is around twelve kilometres and takes thirty to forty minutes on an ordinary day, and up to an hour when the Appia and the ring road are busy, which is most weekday evenings. The handling agents on the general aviation apron are covered on the Rome private terminals page.

The two constraints are the clock and the concrete. Ciampino closes to traffic between 23:00 and 06:00, so a late dinner in Rome and a midnight departure do not go together. If the aircraft genuinely has to move in those hours, it operates from Fiumicino instead, where there is no business aviation terminal and clearing through the main building takes longer. The second constraint is aircraft parking, which is finite and goes early between May and September. We ask for your dates as soon as you have them for exactly that reason, even when nothing else about the trip is settled. If your aircraft is large, a stop in Milan or Naples sometimes solves a Rome problem better than Rome does.

Rome runs two overlapping restrictions that visitors constantly confuse. The ZTL of the centro storico is a limited traffic zone: unless a vehicle is registered for it, it cannot pass the cameras on weekdays between 06:30 and 18:00, or on Saturday afternoons. Trastevere, Testaccio, San Lorenzo and the Tridente have ZTLs of their own with different hours, several of them at night rather than during the day. The Fascia Verde is something else entirely, a low emission zone covering the whole city inside the ring road, judged on the vehicle's emissions class rather than on the time of day, and suspended on Sundays and public holidays.

In practice this decides both the vehicle and the plan. A modern executive saloon or people carrier clears the emissions zone without difficulty. The limited traffic zones are a matter of registration and routing, and both are ours to handle, not yours. What they mean for your day is that the car frequently cannot come to the door. Most of the good addresses in the centre sit inside a ZTL and are reached on foot from a setting down point a few minutes away, and the difference between an elegant arrival and a frustrating one is a chauffeur who has already worked out which corner that is.

The other thing worth knowing is that Rome's centre is genuinely small. Walking from the Spanish Steps to the Pantheon takes a quarter of an hour. A car earns its keep in Rome at the edges of the day, on the run to and from the airport, out to the Appia Antica or the Castelli, and on the long drives north and south. In between, it waits.

Rome's busy season is long rather than sharp. From Easter until late June and again through September and October the centre is full, the Vatican queues run round the block and the drive in from Ciampino is reliably at the slow end of the range. August is the opposite and always surprises people: the Romans leave, a great many restaurants and offices close for two or three weeks, the city is quiet and extremely hot, and the roads south to the coast are the worst they will be all year because everyone else is on them too.

Beyond the season, the events that actually move traffic in Rome are civic rather than commercial. State visits, papal events, marathons and demonstrations close streets across the centre at short notice, and they are not something you can plan for in advance. What we can do is watch for them, know the alternative approaches, and move a collection point rather than let a car sit in a closed street.