Florence
We’ve compiled the best of the best in Florence - browse our top choices for the top things to see or do during your stay.
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1. Colonna della Giustizia
Santa Maria NovellaIn the center of Piazza Santa Trinita is this column from Rome's Terme di Caracalla, given to the Medici grand duke Cosimo I by Pope Pius IV in 1560. Typical of Medici self-assurance, the name translates as the Column of Justice.
Piazza Santa Trinita, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy -
2. Croce al Trebbio
Santa Maria NovellaIn 1338, the Dominican friars (the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella is down the street) erected this little granite column near Piazza Santa Maria Novella to commemorate a famous local victory: it was here in 1244 that they defeated their avowed enemies, the Patarene heretics, in a bloody street brawl.
Via del Trebbio, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy -
3. Le Cascine
In the 16th century, this vast park belonged to the Medici, who used it for hunting, one of their favorite pastimes. It was opened to the public in the 19th century. The park runs for nearly 3 km (2 miles) along the Arno and has roughly 291 acres. It's ideal for strolling on sunny days, and there are paths for jogging, allées perfect for biking, grassy fields for picnicking, and lots of space for rollerblading (as well as a place to rent skates). At the northern tip of the park is the Piazzaletto dell'Indiano, an oddly moving monument dedicated to Rajaram Cuttraputti, Marajah of Kolepoor, who died in Florence in 1870. The park hosts sports enthusiasts, a weekly open-air market, and discotheques. But be warned: at night there's a booming sex-for-sale trade.
Main entrance: Piazza Vittorio Veneto, Viale Fratelli Roselli (at Ponte della Vittoria), Florence, Tuscany, 50100, Italy -
4. Museo Marino Marini and Cappella Rucellai
Santa Maria NovellaA 21-foot-tall bronze horse and rider, one of the major works by artist Marino Marini (1901–80), dominates the space of the main gallery here. The museum itself is an eruption of contemporary space in a deconsecrated 9th-century church, designed with a series of open stairways, walkways, and balconies that allow you to peer at Marini's work from all angles. In addition to his Etruscanesque sculpture, the museum houses Marini's paintings, drawings, and engravings. The Cappella Rucellai, commissioned by one of Florence's most powerful families, shows Renaissance man Leon Battista Alberti (1404--72) at the height of his architectural powers.
Piazza San Pancrazio, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy055-219432Sight Details
Rate Includes: €6, Closed Tues.–Fri. -
5. Museo Novecento
Santa Maria NovellaIt began life as a 13th-century Franciscan hostel offering shelter to tired pilgrims. It later became a convalescent home, and, in the late 18th century, it was a school for poor girls. Now the former Ospedale di San Paolo houses a museum devoted to Italian art of the 20th century. Most of these artists are not exactly household names, but the museum is so beautifully done that it’s worth a visit. The second floor contains works by artists from the second half of the century; start on the third floor, and go directly to the collection of Alberto della Ragione, a naval engineer determined to be on the cutting edge of art collecting. The museum frequently hosts temporary exhibitions of very contemporary art.
Piazza Santa Maria Novella 10, Florence, Tuscany, 50100, Italy055-286132Sight Details
Rate Includes: €9 -
Recommended Fodor’s Video
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6. Museo Salvatore Ferragamo
Santa Maria NovellaA shrine to footwear, the shoes in this dramatically displayed collection were designed by Salvatore Ferragamo (1898–1960) beginning in the early 20th century. Born in southern Italy, Ferragamo jump-started his career in Hollywood by creating shoes for the likes of Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino. He then returned to Florence and set up shop in the 13th-century Palazzo Spini Ferroni. The collection includes about 16,000 shoes, and those on display are frequently rotated. Special exhibitions are also mounted here and are well worth visiting—past shows have been devoted to Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe.
View Tours and ActivitiesVia dei Tornabuoni 2, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy055-356–2846Sight Details
Rate Includes: €15 -
7. Museo Stibbert
Frederick Stibbert (1838–1906), born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, liked to collect things. Over a lifetime of doing so, he amassed some 50,000 objects. This museum, which was also his home, displays many of them. He had a fascination with medieval armor, as well as costumes, particularly Uzbek costumes, which are exhibited in a room called the Moresque Hall. These are mingled with an extensive collection of swords and guns.
View Tours and ActivitiesVia Federico Stibbert 26, Florence, Tuscany, 50124, Italy055-486049Sight Details
Rate Includes: €8, Closed Thurs. -
8. Ognissanti
Santa Maria NovellaThe Umiliati owned this architectural hodgepodge of a church before the Franciscans took it over in the mid-16th century. Beyond the fanciful baroque facade by Matteo Nigetti (1560–1649) are a couple of wonderful 15th-century gems. On the right in the nave is the Madonna della Misericordia by Ghirlandaio; a little farther down is Botticelli's St. Augustine in His Study. A companion piece, directly across the way, is Ghirlandaio's St. Jerome. Also worth seeing is the wooden crucifix by Giotto: the colors dazzle. Pass through the rather dreadfully frescoed cloister to view Ghirlandaio's superb Last Supper.
Piazza Ognissanti, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy055-239–8700Sight Details
Rate Includes: Church free; donation requested for the Last Supper, Check ahead on access to the Last Supper -
9. Palazzo Rucellai
Santa Maria NovellaArchitect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) designed perhaps the very first private residence inspired by antique models—which goes a step further than the Palazzo Strozzi. A comparison between the two is illuminating. Evident on the facade of the Palazzo Rucellai, dating between 1455 and 1470, is the ordered arrangement of windows and rusticated stonework seen on the Palazzo Strozzi, but Alberti's facade is far less forbidding. He devoted a far larger proportion of his wall space to windows, which lighten the facade's appearance, and filled in the remainder with rigorously ordered classical elements borrowed from antiquity. The result, though still severe, is less fortresslike, and Alberti strove for this effect purposely (he is on record as saying that only tyrants need fortresses). Ironically, the Palazzo Rucellai was built some 30 years before the Palazzo Strozzi. Alberti's civilizing ideas here, it turned out, had little influence on the Florentine palazzi that followed. To Renaissance Florentines, power—in architecture, as in life—was equally as impressive as beauty. While you are admiring the facade (the palazzo isn't open to the public), turn around and look at the Loggia dei Rucellai across the street. Built in 1463–66, it was the private "terrace" of the Rucellai family, in-laws to the Medici. Its soaring heights and grand arches are a firm testament to the family's status and wealth.
Via della Vigna Nuova, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy -
10. Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza della RepubblicaThe Strozzi family built this imposing palazzo in an attempt to outshine the nearby Palazzo Medici. The exterior is simple, severe, and massive: it's a testament to the wealth of a patrician, 15th-century Florentine family. The interior courtyard is another matter altogether. It is here that the classical vocabulary—columns, capitals, pilasters, arches, and cornices—is given uninhibited and powerful expression.
View Tours and ActivitiesVia Tornabuoni, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy055-264–5155Sight Details
Rate Includes: Free -
11. Santa Maria Novella
Santa Maria NovellaThe facade of this church looks distinctly clumsy by later Renaissance standards, and with good reason: it is an architectural hybrid. The lower half was completed mostly in the 14th century, and its pointed-arch niches and decorative marble patterns reflect the Gothic style of the day. About 100 years later (around 1456), architect Leon Battista Alberti was called in to complete the job. The marble decoration of his upper story clearly defers to the already existing work below, but the architectural motifs he added evince an entirely different style. The central doorway, the four ground-floor half-columns with Corinthian capitals, the triangular pediment atop the second story, the inscribed frieze immediately below the pediment—these are borrowings from antiquity, and they reflect the new Renaissance style in architecture, born some 35 years earlier at the Spedale degli Innocenti. Alberti's most important addition—the S-curve scrolls (called volutes) surmounting the decorative circles on either side of the upper story—had no precedent whatsoever in antiquity. The problem was to soften the abrupt transition between wide ground floor and narrow upper story. Alberti's solution turned out to be definitive. Once you start to look for them, you will find scrolls such as these (or sculptural variations of them) on churches all over Italy, and every one of them derives from Alberti's example here. The architecture of the interior is, like that of the Duomo, a dignified but somber example of Florentine Gothic. Exploration is essential, however, because the church's store of art treasures is remarkable. Highlights include the 14th-century, stained-glass-rose window depicting the Coronation of the Virgin (above the central entrance); the Cappella Filippo Strozzi (to the right of the altar), containing late-15th-century frescoes and stained glass by Filippino Lippi; the cappella maggiore (the area around the high altar), displaying frescoes by Ghirlandaio; and the Cappella Gondi (to the left of the altar), containing Filippo Brunelleschi's famous wood crucifix, carved around 1410 and said to have so stunned the great Donatello when he first saw it that he dropped a basket of eggs. Of special interest for its great historical importance and beauty is Masaccio's Trinity, on the left-hand wall, almost halfway down the nave. Painted around 1426–27 (at the same time he was working on his frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine), it unequivocally announced the arrival of the Renaissance. The realism of the figure of Christ was revolutionary in itself, but what was probably even more startling to contemporary Florentines was the barrel vault in the background. The mathematical rules for employing single-point perspective in painting had just been discovered (probably by Brunelleschi), and this was one of the first works of art to employ them with utterly convincing success. In the first cloister is a faded and damaged fresco cycle by Paolo Uccello depicting tales from Genesis, with a dramatic vision of the Deluge (at this writing, in restoration). Earlier and better-preserved frescoes painted in 1348–55 by Andrea da Firenze are in the chapter house, or the Cappellone degli Spagnoli (Spanish Chapel), off the cloister.
View Tours and ActivitiesPiazza Santa Maria Novella 19, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, Italy055-219257-museoSight Details
Rate Includes: €8, Closed Sun. morning -
12. Santa Trinita
Santa Maria NovellaStarted in the 11th century by Vallombrosian monks and originally Romanesque in style, this church underwent a Gothic remodeling during the 14th century. (Remains of the Romanesque construction are visible on the interior front wall.) The major works are the fresco cycle and altarpiece in the Cappella Sassetti, the second to the high altar's right, painted by Ghirlandaio between 1480 and 1485. His work here possesses graceful decorative appeal and proudly depicts his native city, as most of the cityscapes show 15th-century Florence in all its glory. The wall frescoes illustrate scenes from the life of St. Francis, and the altarpiece, depicting the Adoration of the Shepherds, veritably glows.
Piazza Santa Trinita, Florence, Tuscany, 50123, ItalySight Details
Rate Includes: Closed Sun. 10:45–4
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