Things to do
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Basilica di Santa Croce
The Franciscan church where Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli are buried, with Giotto frescoes in the chapels beside the high altar. Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel opens off the cloister.
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Boboli Gardens
The formal garden behind the Pitti Palace, laid out from the sixteenth century with grottoes, an amphitheatre cut into the hillside and long gravel avenues. It is the main piece of open ground in central Florence.
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Florence Cathedral
Brunelleschi's dome was raised without centring between 1420 and 1436 and is still the largest masonry dome ever built. Climbing the 463 steps between its two shells is booked separately from the church.
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Mercato Centrale
A cast-iron market hall of 1874, with produce and butchers on the ground floor in the morning and a food hall upstairs that runs late. It is the practical place to eat near San Lorenzo.
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Palazzo Pitti
The Medici residence across the river, now five museums including the Palatine Gallery, where paintings hang frame to frame in the old princely manner rather than by school or date.
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Piazzale Michelangelo
A terrace on the south bank laid out in 1869, with the whole city and the dome laid out below it. The walk up through the Rose Garden takes about half an hour from the river.
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Ponte Vecchio
The only bridge in Florence the retreating Germans left standing in 1944, lined with goldsmiths since the Medici evicted the butchers in 1593. The covered corridor above the shops links the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace.
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Basilica di San Lorenzo
The Medici parish church, with Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy and, entered separately, the Medici Chapels holding Michelangelo's New Sacristy tombs. The facade was never finished and remains raw brick.
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Four Seasons Hotel Firenze
A fifteenth-century palace and a former convent set in the Giardino della Gherardesca, the largest private garden in Florence, ten minutes' walk north of the Duomo.
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Galleria dell'Accademia
Built around Michelangelo's David, moved here in 1873 to get it out of the weather. The unfinished Prisoners in the corridor before it, still half inside their blocks, are what most visitors remember.
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Hotel Savoy
On Piazza della Repubblica in the exact centre of the city, restored by Rocco Forte with rooms looking onto the square and the Duomo a hundred metres away.
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Museo Nazionale del Bargello
Renaissance sculpture in a thirteenth-century barracks and prison: Donatello's bronze David, Verrocchio, and the two competition panels Ghiberti and Brunelleschi made for the Baptistery doors.
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Palazzo Vecchio
The fortified town hall on Piazza della Signoria, still the seat of the city government. The Salone dei Cinquecento is vast and painted wall to ceiling, and the tower can be climbed separately.
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Uffizi Gallery
The Medici collection in the old administrative offices Vasari built, hung roughly in order so a walk through it is a walk through the Renaissance. Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera are the rooms everything funnels toward, and timed entry is effectively compulsory.