ZTL Polignano A Mare

The zone grows in summer

The historic centre is restricted all year round. What catches people out is that from June until early September the restriction reaches beyond it, taking in some of the main roads through the town, because the summer volume of traffic is more than the streets can carry.

This means advice that was accurate in April may be wrong in July, and a route you drove yesterday evening may be closed today. If you are visiting in high season, check the current arrangement rather than relying on a previous trip or a guidebook.

Where to park

The Piazzale San Francesco parking area, a group of lots just south of the restricted zone, is the most convenient legitimate option — a couple of hundred spaces at a modest hourly rate, a few minutes on foot from the old town. It fills on summer afternoons and at weekends, and there is more room a little further out. In July that extra five minutes of walking is a far better trade than circling the centre.

Timing matters more than parking does

Polignano is a day-trip town, twenty minutes from Bari and close to Monopoli, and the rhythm of the day is pronounced. Coaches and cars build up through the late morning, the old town and the viewpoints over the Lama Monachile ravine are at their most crowded in the early afternoon, and it thins out after six.

Arriving before mid-morning or in the early evening changes both the parking and the experience. The ravine beach in particular is a different place at nine in the morning from the one in the photographs taken at two.

The old town is tiny

Once you are in, there is very little of it: a knot of whitewashed lanes inside a medieval gate, a handful of terraces overhanging the water, and the balconies that appear in every photograph of the place. You can walk the whole centre in half an hour. It is also the birthplace of Domenico Modugno, who wrote Volare, and there is a statue of him on the seafront with its arms flung open. None of this requires a car, and none of it permits one.