The collection
Tuscany · A city you cross on foot
Order the bistecca alla fiorentina: a T-bone of Chianina beef, 1.2 to 1.5 kilograms, cooked over hot charcoal and served very rare, with Tuscan bread baked without salt. Then, as the light goes, walk up to Piazzale Michelangelo, a terrace on the south bank built in 1869 for its view. It runs from Forte Belvedere to Santa Croce, with the dome, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Bargello and the bridges over the Arno below you.
From the railway station it is about 500 metres to the Duomo, and the centre is closed to through-traffic, so you walk. The cathedral is faced in white, green and pink marble under Brunelleschi's dome, and from 1331 the city's wool merchants paid for its building through their guild. Florence began in 59 BC as a Roman colony for veteran soldiers, laid out like an army camp. The Arno runs through the middle of the city and has not always stayed in its banks: small plaques on the walls mark how high the water rose in the flood of November 1966.
Brunelleschi raised the dome between 1420 and 1436, over a cathedral begun more than a century earlier. It spans 44 metres and went up without a wooden frame to hold it from below. It is made of 2 brick shells, one inside the other, and the lantern on top reaches 114.5 metres. It is still the largest masonry dome in the world.
Vasari began it in 1560 as offices for Cosimo I de' Medici, which is what uffizi means, and its courtyard runs long and narrow to a screen of columns open to the Arno. The Medici hung their collection on the top floor, and the gallery opened officially to the public in 1769. Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera are here.
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Borgo Pinti, Santa Croce
Two Renaissance palazzos, a courtyard for a lobby, and 4.45 hectares of private garden, a 15-minute walk from the Duomo.
Rebuilt in 1345 after a flood, and the only bridge in Florence the retreating Germans left standing in 1944. Goldsmiths and jewellers have held its shops since Ferdinando I gave the bridge to them in the 1590s, and from upriver you can see the back rooms added in the 17th century. A bronze bust of Benvenuto Cellini, himself a goldsmith, stands halfway across, and the Vasari Corridor, built in 1565, runs above the shops.
Florence's political square since 1268, when the houses of the defeated Ghibellines were pulled down to make room for it. A copy of Michelangelo's David stands at the door of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Loggia beside it is an open-air sculpture gallery; Cellini's Perseus is among the statues around the square. In front of the Neptune fountain, a round marble plaque in the paving marks where Savonarola was hanged and burned in 1498.
Begun in 1294 and known as the Temple of the Italian Glories for the people buried inside it: Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli among them. Giotto painted the frescoes in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels. In the friars' old dormitory the leather school still works, and you can watch its artisans making purses and wallets.
An octagon in white and dark green marble, dedicated to John the Baptist, the city's patron saint, and Dante was baptised in it. Its mosaic ceiling, around 10 million tiles laid between about 1240 and 1300, has a Last Judgement made while Dante was a child. The ceiling has been under restoration since 2023, with completion expected in 2028. Ghiberti's east doors, with 10 gilded bronze panels made between 1429 and 1447, are copies on the building, and the originals are in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.
A short list of extraordinary places to stay.
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