ZTL Pistoia
Pistoia's restricted area covers the historic centre around Piazza del Duomo, and the pedestrian core inside it is closed around the clock. The town is often skipped by people driving between Florence and Lucca, which is their loss and your advantage: it has a full set of Tuscan medieval architecture and a fraction of the visitors, and the centre is small enough to cross in ten minutes on foot.
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Limited Traffic Zones in Pistoia
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ZTL Pistoia
Daily, 24 h
The historic centre around Piazza del Duomo; the pedestrian core is closed around the clock.
A continuous restriction
The zone covers the historic centre, with the pedestrian core at its middle closed to vehicles at all hours. There is no daily window in which driving in becomes reasonable.
The centre sits inside the line of the old walls, and beyond that the town is ordinary and drivable. As boundaries go it is a clear one.
Where to leave the car
Park outside the centre — there is parking around the ring and near the station on the southern side — and walk in. The distances are short and the ground is flat, which is not something you can say about most of the hill towns nearby.
Pistoia is also on the railway between Florence and Lucca, and a day trip by train works well. If you are driving the region, it makes a calmer overnight base than either of its neighbours.
The square at the middle
Piazza del Duomo is the point of the town: the cathedral with its striped façade and a silver altar of St James that took two centuries and many hands to finish, the baptistery in green and white marble across the square, the bishop's palace and the town hall on the other sides, and a bell tower that began as a watchtower.
The banded green-and-white stonework runs through several of the churches here, and the Pisan-Romanesque fronts with their tiers of little columns are the local signature. All of it is inside the restricted centre, and all of it is within a few minutes' walk.
Trees, and the mountains behind
The plain around Pistoia is one of the largest ornamental plant nurseries in Europe — the fields on the approach roads are full of young trees in rows, grown for export across the continent. It is an unusual landscape and explains a good deal about the local economy.
Behind the town the Apennines rise towards the Abetone pass and the ski country, and the mountain road up through the villages is a fine drive. That is what the car is for; the centre is not.
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Zone shapes are derived from publicly available information, including accessibilitacentristorici.it and OpenStreetMap; base map © OpenStreetMap and © CARTO. Boundaries are simplified and hours are indicative — a guide, not an official source.