Florence travel guide

Top 10 sights in Florence

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Arek N. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Uffizi Gallery

   Built by Vasari from 1560 as the Medici administrative offices — uffizi means offices — and turned into a gallery as the family collection filled it. The last Medici left the whole thing to the city in 1743 on the condition that it never leave Florence, which is why it is all still here.

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2. 

   2© Petar Milošević · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Florence Cathedral

   Begun in 1296 with no idea how the crossing would ever be roofed; Brunelleschi solved it between 1420 and 1436 with a double shell of herringbone brickwork raised without centring, and it remains the largest masonry dome ever built. Four hundred and sixty-three steps climb between the two shells.

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3. 

   3© Almaak · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Palazzo Pitti

   A palace begun for a banker who wanted to outdo the Medici and then sold to them in 1549 when he went broke. It later housed the kings of Italy, and its Palatine Gallery hangs pictures in the eighteenth-century manner, frame to frame up the wall.

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4. 

   4© Francesco Bini · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palazzo Vecchio

   The town hall since 1314, and the seat of every government the city has had. Michelangelo's David stood outside it until 1873, and inside, the Hall of the Five Hundred has a Vasari battle scene painted over an unfinished Leonardo that people are still trying to find.

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5. 

   5© Rhododendrites · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica of Santa Croce

   The Franciscan church, and where Florence buries its own: Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini are all here, with a cenotaph to Dante, who is not. The flood of November 1966 rose about five metres in the nave and wrecked Cimabue's Crucifix, which became the emblem of the disaster.

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6. 

   6© Zairon · CC BY 4.0

   Florence Baptistery

   The octagonal baptistery where every Florentine including Dante was christened, older than the cathedral beside it. Ghiberti's east doors took him twenty-seven years and Michelangelo called them the gates of paradise; the panels outside are copies and the originals are in the cathedral museum.

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7. 

   7© Sailko · CC BY 3.0

   Bargello National Museum

   The city's oldest public building, from 1255, later the police headquarters and prison, and now the sculpture museum. It holds Donatello's bronze David — the first free-standing nude since antiquity — and the two competition panels of 1401 by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi that started the Renaissance argument.

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8. 

   8© Commonists · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica of Santa Maria Novella

   The Dominican church, with a facade completed by Alberti in 1470 that fitted classical geometry over a Gothic front. Inside is Masaccio's Trinity of about 1427, the first painting anywhere to use single-point perspective correctly, and it still stops people in the aisle.

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9. 

   9© Nelson Pérez · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Basilica of San Lorenzo

   The Medici parish church, rebuilt by Brunelleschi, with two sacristies: the old one his, the new one Michelangelo's, holding the tombs with Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk. The unfinished brick facade is the family's, too — they never got round to facing it.

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10. 

    10© Samuli Lintula · CC BY 2.5

    piazza della Signoria

    The political square of the city, where the Signoria met and where Savonarola was hanged and burned in 1498, marked by a bronze disc in the paving. The Loggia dei Lanzi beside it is an open sculpture gallery, with Cellini's Perseus holding up the head of Medusa.

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1. 

   1© Sailko · CC BY 3.0

   Galleria dell'Accademia

   The gallery built around Michelangelo's David, moved here in 1873 to get it out of the weather. At five metres it is bigger than photographs suggest; the corridor of his unfinished Slaves, still half in the block, is what people remember afterwards.

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2. 

   2© Sailko · CC BY 2.5

   Vasari Corridor

   An enclosed passage built in 1565 in about five months so that the Medici could walk from the town hall to their palace without mixing with the city — some seven hundred and fifty metres over the top of the Ponte Vecchio. It reopened to visitors in 2024 after decades shut.

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3. 

   3© Sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Palazzo Medici Riccardi

   Michelozzo's palace of 1444 for Cosimo the Elder, and the model for every Renaissance palace after it — heavy rustication below, refined above, a cortile in the middle. The Magi Chapel inside was frescoed by Gozzoli in 1459 with the Medici themselves in the procession.

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4. 

   4© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Boboli Gardens

   The Medici garden behind the Pitti, laid out from 1550 and the model that Italian formal gardening — and later Versailles — was built on. It climbs the hill in terraces, with a grotto of dripping artificial stone by Buontalenti and an Egyptian obelisk in the amphitheatre.

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5. 

   5© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Giotto's Campanile

   The cathedral bell tower, begun by Giotto in 1334 and finished after his death, eighty-five metres of white, green and pink marble with sculpted panels round the base. Four hundred and fourteen steps go up it, and unlike the dome it gives you the dome in the view.

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6. 

   6© Michael Wittwer · CC BY-SA 4.0

   piazzale Michelangelo

   A terrace laid out in 1869 on the Oltrarno hillside, with a bronze copy of David in the middle and the whole city below — the dome, the tower, the bridges and the hills behind. Everyone comes at sunset; the stairs up from Piazza Poggi are quicker than the bus.

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   7

   Medici Chapels

   Two chapels attached to San Lorenzo. The Chapel of the Princes is an octagon lined floor to dome in inlaid hard stone, which took three centuries to finish. The New Sacristy is Michelangelo's: the tombs of two minor Medici carrying Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk.

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8. 

   8© Lucarelli · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Santo Spirito

   Brunelleschi's last church, in the Oltrarno, finished after his death and not quite as he intended — the facade was never built and remains a blank plaster wall, which the square in front of it has grown fond of.

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   9

   San Miniato al Monte

   A basilica in green and white marble on the hill above the city, its facade from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and its inlaid floor from 1207. The monks sing vespers in Gregorian chant in the crypt in the late afternoon, and the terrace outside beats the Piazzale Michelangelo below it.

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10. 

    10© Guido Castelli66 · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Orsanmichele

    A grain market of 1337 converted into a church, with the guilds each commissioning a statue for a niche in its outer walls. Donatello's St George, Ghiberti's St John and Verrocchio's Doubting Thomas were made for those niches; the originals are now in the museum upstairs.

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