Florence Travel Guide: What to See, Eat & Know | Palace Tours

Florence, the capital of Italy’s Tuscany region, sits in a broad bowl of hills on the banks of the Arno, roughly 230 kilometres north of Rome and about 300 kilometres south of Milan — close enough that high-speed trains make the run from either city in well under two hours. The historic centre is compact enough to cross on foot in half an hour, yet it holds a concentration of art and architecture that has few rivals anywhere in the world. UNESCO inscribed the whole of that centre as a World Heritage Site in 1982, and standing in Piazza del Duomo it is easy to understand why: terracotta rooftops, a marble cathedral in green, white and pink, and a dome that has defined the skyline since the 1430s.

This was the city that funded and argued the Renaissance into being. Wool and banking money — above all the money of the Medici, who ran Florence for the better part of three centuries — paid for Brunelleschi’s dome, Donatello’s bronzes, Michelangelo’s marble and Botticelli’s tempera panels. The florin, minted here from 1252, became medieval Europe’s reserve currency, and the Italian language itself owes its shape to a Florentine, Dante Alighieri. Today the city carries all of it lightly: the great museums sit alongside working leather ateliers, tripe carts, and wine bars that have poured Chianti to the same neighbourhood for generations.

What to see in Florence

• Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) — Filippo Brunelleschi’s octagonal dome, raised without conventional centring between 1420 and 1436, is still the largest masonry dome ever built. Climbing the 463 steps between its inner and outer shells is one of the great architectural experiences in Europe.
• The Baptistery and Giotto’s Campanile — The Baptistery of San Giovanni is among the city’s oldest buildings, and its east doors, Ghiberti’s gilded panels that Michelangelo called the Gates of Paradise, changed the course of European sculpture. The bell tower beside it, begun by Giotto in 1334, gives the best close view of the dome itself.
• Galleria degli Uffizi — Built as Medici administrative offices and now one of the world’s essential picture galleries. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera anchor a collection that runs from Giotto through Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio.
• Galleria dell’Accademia — Home to Michelangelo’s David, carved from a single flawed block of Carrara marble that other sculptors had abandoned. The unfinished Prisoners lining the approach corridor, figures half-emerging from raw stone, are for many visitors the more moving works.
• Ponte Vecchio — The Arno’s oldest bridge, lined with shops since the Middle Ages and given over to goldsmiths by decree in 1593. Above the shopfronts runs the Vasari Corridor, the private elevated passage the Medici used to cross the river unseen.
• Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio — The city’s political heart for seven hundred years, an open-air sculpture gallery under the arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Inside the fortress-like town hall, the vast Salone dei Cinquecento still functions as a civic room.
• Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens — The Medici’s Oltrarno residence, now several museums in one, opening onto a sculpted Renaissance garden of terraces, grottoes and cypress avenues that became the model for formal gardens across Europe.
• Basilica di Santa Croce — The Franciscan church where Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini are buried, with frescoes by Giotto in the transept chapels and a quiet cloister by Brunelleschi alongside.
• Piazzale Michelangelo — A twenty-minute walk up the south bank for the classic view: the dome, the campanile, the bridges and the Tuscan hills behind. Go late in the day, when the stone turns amber.

What to eat in Florence

Florentine cooking is famously plain-spoken — good bread, good oil, good meat, and very little fuss. The dish that carries the city’s name is bistecca alla fiorentina, a thick T-bone from Chianina cattle, grilled over embers and served rare, traditionally sold by weight for the table to share. Around it sits a repertoire of frugal country cooking: ribollita, a reboiled soup of cavolo nero, beans and stale bread; pappa al pomodoro, the same bread turned into a thick tomato porridge; crostini di fegatini, chicken liver pâté on toast, which begins almost every Tuscan meal; and pappardelle al cinghiale, wide ribbons of pasta with a slow wild boar ragù. Note that Tuscan bread is baked without salt, a habit centuries old and startling on the first bite.

The street food is worth planning around. Lampredotto — the fourth stomach of the cow, simmered and piled into a crusty roll with salsa verde — is sold from carts and kiosks across the city and remains a genuinely local lunch rather than a tourist ritual. For something lighter, schiacciata, the dimpled, oil-rich flatbread, is split and filled at bakeries all over the centre. Finish with cantucci, the twice-baked almond biscuits, dipped in a small glass of vin santo, or with gelato: Florence has a strong claim on its invention, and the good gelaterie still make it in small batches daily. To drink, look to Chianti Classico from the hills immediately south, Brunello from further down the Val d’Orcia, and the Negroni, which was mixed here for the first time around 1919 when a count asked for his Americano to be stiffened with gin.

Shopping & crafts

Leather is the city’s signature craft. The Scuola del Cuoio, the leather school founded in the cloisters of Santa Croce after the Second World War, still trains artisans and sells what they make; the stalls around San Lorenzo are cheaper and far more variable in quality. Ponte Vecchio remains the goldsmiths’ bridge, and the workshops of the Oltrarno — picture framers, gilders, restorers, and marbled-paper makers turning out carta marmorizzata by hand — are where the city’s craft tradition actually lives. Do not miss the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, a pharmacy and perfumery that Dominican friars began in the thirteenth century and which still sells soaps and colognes from frescoed rooms.

Best time to visit

April to early June and September to October are the sweet spots: warm days, long light, and hills that are green in spring and gold in autumn. July and August are hot and heavily crowded, and many family-run restaurants close for part of August. Winter is the quiet season — short days and a real chill off the Arno, but empty galleries, easy restaurant tables and a low, raking light that flatters the stone. It is the season Florence rewards the traveller who has come for the art rather than the piazzas.

Good to know

• Book the big museums in advance. The Uffizi and the Accademia both use timed entry, and walk-up queues in high season can run to hours. The dome climb is reservation-only.
• The centre is a restricted traffic zone. The ZTL is camera-enforced, and driving into it without authorisation brings a fine by post months later. Arrive by train where you can — Santa Maria Novella station is a short walk from the Duomo.
• Dress for the churches. Shoulders and knees covered is enforced at the Duomo, Santa Croce and most working churches; a light scarf solves it.
• Everything worth seeing is walkable, but the streets are stone and often uneven. Comfortable shoes matter more here than in almost any other Italian city.
• Museums close on rotation. Several state museums shut on Mondays and some smaller sites on Tuesdays — check before building a day around one.

Florence pairs naturally with the great luxury rail journeys of Italy, and Palace Tours can build the city into an itinerary that reaches it the way it deserves to be reached — slowly, comfortably, and with the Tuscan countryside sliding past the window on the way in.