Four days in Florence: the Renaissance is still in the rooms it was made for

Three nights in the centre, two museums booked in advance and the rest on foot, with a last morning across the river where the workshops still are.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Florence
Places
10 across 4 days
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Florence is smaller than its reputation. The part you have come to see is a rough oval about a kilometre across, and you can cross it in twenty minutes without hurrying. Everything below is on foot, and the only vehicle in the plan is the train you arrive on.

The compression is the point and also the difficulty. A quantity of art that would be spread across a country in most of Europe is stacked into a few streets here, and four days of trying to see all of it produces the well-documented condition of standing in front of a masterpiece feeling nothing at all. The cure is to do less on purpose.

So: two things booked, the Uffizi and the dome, because those are the queues that eat half a day. Everything else you walk into. Mornings for the ticketed rooms, afternoons for churches and the river, and dinner late, which is when the city stops being a museum and goes back to being a provincial Tuscan town with very good food.

Highlights

  • Brunelleschi's dome from the inside of its own shell, on a staircase built for the men who laid the bricks
  • The Uffizi at opening, when the Botticelli room is briefly nearly empty
  • David in the room built for him, at the end of a corridor of unfinished figures
  • The Brancacci Chapel across the river, where painters came to learn perspective from a man who died at twenty-six

Where to stay

Florence, three nights

A wool and banking town that got very rich in the fourteenth century and spent the money on art for two hundred years, under a family who understood that patronage buys a kind of permanence that politics does not. The Medici funded, collected, and eventually left the entire collection to the city on condition it never leave Florence. It never has.

What that produced is a city where the art is mostly still in the building it was commissioned for. The frescoes are on the chapel walls they were painted on, the sculpture is in the palace it was carved for, and the effect of that is very different from a national gallery in a capital.

Day by day

Day 1 in Florence

Santa Maria Novella and the river at dusk

The station puts you two minutes from a church most people walk past on their way somewhere else, which makes it the right first stop: quiet, enormous, and holding a painting that effectively invented the idea of depth on a flat wall.

After that, do nothing structured. Walk south towards the river, cross it, and be on the Ponte Vecchio when the light goes. The centre is small enough that a first evening's aimless walking is not wasted time, it is how you learn where everything is.

  1. 16:00

    Santa Maria Novella

    Religious

    The Dominican church at the top of the square, with a green and white marble front and Masaccio's Trinity on the left wall, the first painting in Europe to use one-point perspective properly. People used to say the wall looked as though it had a chapel cut into it.

  2. 19:00

    Ponte Vecchio

    Architecture

    Shops have stood on this bridge since the fourteenth century, and they were butchers until a grand duke decided in the 1590s that he could not walk over the smell and replaced them with goldsmiths, who are still there. It is the only bridge in Florence the retreating Germans did not blow up in 1944.

  3. 20:30

    I fratellini

    Eat

    A hole in the wall selling panini and a glass of wine to people standing on the pavement, which is the correct first dinner if you arrived late and cannot face a restaurant.

With more time: Piazzale Michelangelo, the terrace on the hill across the river, is the classic first evening if you have the legs for it. Twenty minutes uphill from the far end of the Ponte Vecchio, or a bus from the centre, and the whole city is laid out below with the dome in the middle.

Day 2 in Florence

The cathedral, the dome and David

The cathedral group is four separate buildings and four separate tickets bundled together, and the one that matters is the climb. Brunelleschi built the dome without a supporting framework, using a herringbone brick pattern and two shells with a staircase between them, and nobody has ever been entirely sure how he intended it to work. You go up inside that gap, past the fresco of the Last Judgement at close range, and come out on the lantern above the whole city.

It is not a climb for anybody who dislikes confined spaces. More than four hundred steps, no lift, one direction of travel, and the last section is a curved passage that follows the shell.

In the afternoon, walk ten minutes north to a purpose-built room at the end of a corridor. David was carved from a block another sculptor had already given up on, stood outside the town hall for close to four hundred years, and was moved indoors in 1873 when the weather started winning.

  1. 09:00

    Santa Maria del Fiore

    Religious

    Vast, cool and surprisingly bare inside, because most of what was made for it is now in the museum around the corner. The dome climb starts from a separate door on the north side, and your slot is the time you must be at that door.

  2. 11:45

    Baptistery

    Religious

    The octagonal building in front of the cathedral, older than it, and famous for bronze doors so good that Michelangelo is supposed to have called them the gates of paradise. The panels you see outside are copies; the originals are indoors and restored.

  3. 12:45

    Lunch near the central market

    Eat

    Five minutes north and the prices halve. Several of the old places are lunch only, take no bookings, and put you on a shared table.

  4. 15:00

    Galleria dell'Accademia

    Culture

    David, and the four unfinished Slaves in the corridor leading to him, which are the more interesting sculptures: half-emerged figures still stuck in their blocks. Forty minutes is enough unless the painting galleries upstairs appeal.

With more time: The cathedral museum across the square holds everything taken off these buildings for safekeeping, including the original bronze door panels and a Michelangelo Pietà he attacked with a hammer and left unfinished. It is the least crowded major museum in the city.

Day 3 in Florence

The Uffizi, the Signoria and the town hall

Take the first entry of the day. The Uffizi holds the collection the last Medici left to Florence, hung in the building Vasari put up as government offices, and by half past ten the Botticelli room is a scrum. At nine it is not.

Do not try to see all of it. The corridor is long, the rooms are in chronological order, and the fatigue is real: go straight to the early Renaissance rooms while you are fresh, then let yourself leave when you stop looking properly.

The square outside is the other half of the day. It has functioned as the political centre of Florence for seven hundred years, it is free, and the sculpture standing in it under an open loggia would be the main attraction of most cities.

  1. 08:45

    Galleria degli Uffizi

    Historic

    Botticelli, Leonardo, Titian, Caravaggio and the Piero della Francesca portraits, in a purpose-built sixteenth century office block with a corridor of ancient Roman sculpture down the middle. Book the first slot and enter at the far door, not the one with the queue outside it.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch off the square

    Eat

    Two streets in any direction away from the piazza is the whole rule here. The tables with a view of the Palazzo Vecchio charge for the view.

  3. 14:00

    Piazza della Signoria

    Architecture

    An open-air sculpture gallery that happens to be a public square: a Perseus in bronze holding a severed head, a Roman rape scene carved from one block of marble, and a copy of David standing where the original stood.

  4. 15:00

    Palazzo Vecchio

    Culture

    The fortress town hall, still the seat of the city council, with a council chamber the size of a church and a ceiling paid for to make a point. The tower climb has a better view than the crowds at the cathedral realise.

With more time: The Bargello, five minutes east, has the sculpture the Uffizi does not: Donatello's bronze David, Michelangelo's early Bacchus, and the two competition panels that decided who got to make the baptistery doors. It closes early, so it is a morning or nothing.

Day 4 in Florence

The Oltrarno, and the chapel painters came to study

Cross the river for the last morning. The Oltrarno was the artisan side and to a real extent still is: workshops with the doors open, gilders, a violin maker, and rents that have not yet caught up with the other bank.

The reason to come is a small chapel at the end of a church that was gutted by fire in the eighteenth century. The frescoes survived. Masaccio painted them in his early twenties and died at twenty-six, and for the next hundred years every painter in Florence, Michelangelo included, came here to copy them.

From there it is a twenty minute walk back over the river to the station, so an afternoon train is comfortable.

  1. 09:30

    Santa Maria del Carmine

    Religious

    The Brancacci Chapel, booked and timed, with a strict limit on how long you get inside. Adam and Eve leaving the garden, painted with real weight and real distress, next to the same scene by an older painter who did not yet know how.

  2. 11:30

    Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella

    Culture

    A pharmacy the Dominican friars started in the thirteenth century, selling soap, rose water and incense papers out of frescoed rooms. Free to walk into and the best gift shop in the city by a distance.

  3. 12:45

    Last lunch, then Santa Maria Novella station

    Eat

    Eat on the far side of the river where it is cheaper, then walk back over the bridge. Fifteen minutes to the platforms from anywhere in the centre.

With more time: The Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens are on the same side of the river and would fill the morning instead: four museums in one enormous building, and a landscaped hillside behind it with the best view in the city that does not involve a climb.

Before you go

Where to stay

Anywhere inside the ring of boulevards that traces the old walls, which is most of what you would call Florence, puts everything within a fifteen minute walk. The streets around Santa Croce and San Lorenzo are the good middle ground: central, cheaper than the blocks touching the cathedral, and with somewhere to eat that is not aimed at you.

The Oltrarno, over the river, is the other answer and the better one for a second visit. It is where the furniture restorers, gilders and frame makers still work, it is five minutes from the middle by bridge, and it goes quiet at night in a way the centre no longer does.

Getting around

On foot, entirely. The historic centre is largely closed to traffic, the distances are short, and the only climb worth taking a bus for is the one up to the terrace above the river.

Trains arrive at Santa Maria Novella, which is at the edge of the centre rather than outside it, so you can walk to almost any hotel with a bag. Taxis do not cruise for fares here; you find a rank or call one.

What to book, and when

Two things, both timed and both worth the small booking fee: the Uffizi, and the climb to the top of the dome, which has a hard cap on numbers because the staircase inside is one person wide in places. Book the dome for a morning slot and the Uffizi for the moment it opens.

The Accademia, for David, and the Brancacci Chapel also run timed entry and sell out in season, though a day or two ahead is usually enough. Everything else in these four days you can walk into. Churches expect covered shoulders and knees, and several of the big ones now charge for entry or ask for a small donation at the door.

Eating

Tuscan cooking is blunt: bread, beans, oil, offal and beef, seasoned with not very much. The famous dish is bistecca alla fiorentina, a thick T-bone grilled rare and sold by weight, which means the price on the menu is per hundred grams and the steak is for two people at least. Read the menu carefully before you order one by mistake.

Lunch is where the value is. The old trattorie near the central market still do a two course lunch for the price of a cocktail elsewhere in the centre, several of them take no bookings and seat you with strangers, and a good number close entirely in the evening. Anything with a laminated menu in four languages within sight of the cathedral is not one of them.

The mistake everybody makes here is treating Florence as a checklist, because it is the one city where the checklist is short enough to look achievable. Four days at that pace ends with a camera roll and a headache.

The alternative costs nothing: pick one great thing a day, sit down for two hours in the middle of it, and spend the evening walking. The city was built for people going about their business on foot, and it still reads best that way.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is four days enough for Florence?
It is comfortable. The centre is walkable in twenty minutes end to end, and four days covers the cathedral, the Uffizi, David and the Oltrarno without three museums in a day. What four days does not cover is Tuscany, which needs its own trip or at least a hire car.
What do I actually have to book?
The dome climb and the Uffizi, both timed and both capped. The Accademia and the Brancacci Chapel sell out in season but a day or two ahead is usually enough. Nothing else here needs advance planning.
Is the dome climb hard?
More than four hundred steps with no lift, in a stairway that runs between the two shells of the dome and narrows to one person wide. Fine if you are reasonably fit, genuinely unpleasant if you are claustrophobic. The bell tower next to it is a similar height, has an open terrace and is easier to face.
Can I do a day trip to Siena or Pisa?
You can, and it is the obvious use of a fifth day rather than one of these four. Pisa is an hour by train and about three hours of sightseeing, Siena is a coach from the bus station and deserves longer than a day.
When should I come?
Spring or October. July and August are hot in a city with stone streets and no breeze, and the queues are at their worst. Winter is cold, damp and half empty, and the museums are a pleasure.