The Ponte Santa Trinita is the bridge over the Arno that links Via de' Tornabuoni, in the center of Florence, with the Oltrarno. Guidebooks have praised it for centuries for its elegance: three arches with a taut, light curve, built of pietra...
The Museo Nazionale di San Marco is a 15th-century Dominican convent turned into a museum, in Florence, in Piazza San Marco. Forty-four friars' cells, and in each one a fresco: Fra Angelico and his workshop painted an entire convent, and today...
The Museo Stibbert is the house-museum of an English collector with a Tuscan mother, on the hill of Montughi, in Florence. Inside are over 50,000 objects: armor, weapons, paintings, porcelain, fans, even buttons, in an imaginative 19th-century...
The Museo Horne is the home of an Englishman who fell in love with Florence: a Renaissance palace on Via de' Benci, a short walk from Santa Croce, brought back to how it looked in the late 1400s and furnished with the paintings, furniture and...
The Opificio delle Pietre Dure is in Florence, on Via degli Alfani, an institute that unites an ancient manufactory and a great restoration center. For visitors, the thing to see is the museum: works made of hard stones, cut and fitted together...
The Loggia della Signoria, also called the Loggia dei Lanzi, is a Gothic portico overlooking Piazza della Signoria, in Florence, next to Palazzo Vecchio. Today it is an open-air museum: under its three arches stand original sculptures, from the...
The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana is one of the great libraries of Europe, born from the Medici collections and largely designed by Michelangelo. You enter through the cloisters of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, in Florence, hence the name. It...
The Giardino Bardini is a historic garden in Florence, in the Oltrarno, climbing for about four hectares up the hill below Piazzale Michelangelo, from Palazzo dei Mozzi to Villa Bardini. From the top you get a spectacular view of the...
The Giardino dei Semplici is Florence's botanical garden, founded in 1545 at the wish of Cosimo I de' Medici: more than two hectares of flowerbeds, greenhouses and centuries-old trees, with its entrance on Via La Pira. It is one of the oldest...
The Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia (MNAF - National Museum Alinari of Photography), formerly Museo della Storia della Fotografia Fratelli Alinari is a photography museum located on the piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence (Italy). It...
The Gallery of Modern Art is one of the museums housed in Pitti Palace in Florence. This vast collection offers a complete Italian panorama of the artistic period from the late eighteenth century (Neoclassical era) to the early decades of the...
The Museo Stefano Bardini is a civic museum in Florence's Oltrarno, between Via de' Renai and Piazza de' Mozzi. It holds more than 3,600 works collected by the antiques dealer who built it: sculptures, paintings, weapons, rugs and...
The Museo Casa di Dante is the museum dedicated to the poet in the medieval heart of Florence, a stone's throw from the Badia and the Bargello. It tells the life of Dante on Via Santa Margherita, in a building that incorporates medieval houses...
Forte Belvedere is a 16th-century fortress on the Boboli hill, in Florence, at the highest point above Palazzo Pitti. It is a fort, but also one of the finest viewpoints: its bastions look on one side at the city, on the other at the...
The Museo delle Porcellane (in English: The Porcelain Museum) is located in the Casino del Cavaliere, one of the highest points of the Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace in Florence. The museum, housed in the Villino del Cavaliere high in the...
Il Porcellino (Italian "piglet") is the local Florentine nickname for the bronze fountain of a boar. The fountain figure was sculpted and cast by Baroque master Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) shortly before 1634, following a marble Italian copy of a...
The Museo Ferragamo tells the story of one of Italy's most famous fashion houses in the place where it was born: the cellars of Palazzo Spini Feroni, the medieval palace overlooking the Santa Trinita bridge, on Via Tornabuoni. It is the museum...
The Silver Museum is part of the Pitti Palace complex in Florence. Located in the north wing of the palace (summer apartments accessible from the Buontalenti courtyard), it was established in the second half of the 19th century. The museum is...
The Loggia del Bigallo is the elegant Gothic loggia in Piazza San Giovanni, at the corner with Via dei Calzaiuoli, right across from the Baptistery. It is part of a complex with an oratory and a small museum, which holds the works of the two...
The Fortezza da Basso is a large 16th-century fortress in Florence, pentagonal in plan, set among the ring-road avenues. Today it houses Firenze Fiera, with trade fairs, concerts and conferences, but the bastions and the keep are still those of...
The Parco delle Cascine is Florence's largest public park: 160 hectares of lawns and woods, a strip almost three and a half kilometers long on the right bank of the Arno, from the historic center to the confluence with the Mugnone stream. It is...
The church of Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, on Borgo Pinti, is a Renaissance and Baroque complex hidden behind a sober façade. It has an elegant portico by Giuliano da Sangallo, a Baroque main chapel glittering with marble and, in the former...
The Museo Marino Marini is the museum of the sculptor Marino Marini, in Piazza San Pancrazio, a short walk from Palazzo Rucellai, inside an old deconsecrated church. It gathers almost two hundred works including sculptures, portraits and...
The Loggia della Signoria, also called the Loggia dei Lanzi, is a Gothic loggia in Piazza della Signoria in Florence, next to Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi. Under its three great arches is a museum without doors, with original masterpieces on...
The Chapel of the Magi is a small room on the piano nobile of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, entirely covered by a cycle of frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1459. It was the Medici's private chapel, and it is the painter's...
The Pazzi Chapel is one of the most harmonious pieces of Renaissance architecture, and is considered Filippo Brunelleschi's masterpiece. It stands in the first cloister of the basilica of Santa Croce, in Florence: it was the friars' chapter...
Piazza della Santissima Annunziata is one of Florence's most harmonious squares: arcaded on three sides, with two twin buildings on the fourth, north of Piazza del Duomo. Of all the city's squares it is the one that best expresses the ideals of...
The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence is a university museum on Via del Proconsolo, a stone's throw from the Duomo, inside Palazzo Nonfinito. It holds about 25,000 objects from peoples all over the world, spread across 25...
The English Cemetery is an island of cypresses and white tombs in the middle of the traffic of Piazzale Donatello, in Florence, just outside the historic center. A quiet, romantic garden where poets, artists and travelers from sixteen nations...
The park was created by architect Giuseppe Poggi in 1865, commissioned by the municipality of Florence as the city was going to be the new capital of Italy. It has a surface of c. 1 ha, over terraces.
The Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze is a natural history museum in 6 major collections and is part of the University of Florence. Museum collections are open mornings except Wednesday, and all day Saturday; an admission fee is charged. The...
The Santa Maria Novella station is the main railway station of Florence and Tuscany, one kilometer from the Duomo, right behind the apse of the basilica of the same name. It is not just a place to pass through: the passenger building, designed by...
Piazza Santa Croce is one of the great squares in the center of Florence: a wide, regular rectangle dominated by the white neo-Gothic façade of the basilica of Santa Croce, with noble palaces on its sides.
For centuries it has been the...
Palazzo Antinori is a palace of the Renaissance age, located at the end of Via de' Tornabuoni. The palace was built in 1461-1469, perhaps under the design of Giuliano da Maiano, for Giovanni di Bono Boni. The unfinished palace was sold in 1475 to...
Palazzo Spini Feroni is the medieval palace overlooking the Santa Trinita bridge, at the start of Via Tornabuoni, with its exposed stone, battlements and the look of a fortress. It is one of the finest examples of medieval residential...
The Giardino Torrigiani is a large private Romantic garden in the center of Florence, between Via de' Serragli and the walls, of about ten hectares: after Boboli, the largest in the city. It is not a simple park: it is a symbolic path from day to...
The Torre della Pagliazza is a round tower in Piazza Sant'Elisabetta, in the oldest part of Florence. Many call it the oldest building in the city to have kept its original appearance. At its base is a small archaeological museum.
The...