Landmarks in Florence
38 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in Florence.
Antico Setificio Fiorentino
Listen, before you look. On this quiet Oltrarno lane, away from the crowds, if the workshop door is open you can sometimes hear it — a soft, rhythmic clack and thump, over and over. That's a hand loom.
Casa di Dante — Sentenced to the Fire
This narrow lane, this tower house they call the Casa di Dante. I'll be honest with you — it's a reconstruction, a museum built where scholars think his family lived, not the actual walls he grew up in.
Galleria dell'Accademia — The David
You've reached the Accademia. Before you get to the famous one at the far end of the hall, look at the figures lining the way to him — huge, half-finished bodies that seem to be fighting their way out of raw blocks of stone.
Giotto's Campanile
The tall tower rising beside the cathedral, banded in the same white, green, and pink marble, is Giotto's Campanile — the bell tower, nearly three hundred feet of it, one of the most decorated towers in Europe.
Il Porcellino — Mercato Nuovo
You'll probably spot the line before you spot the statue. Under this open-sided market loggia sits a life-sized bronze boar, mid-crouch, with a small queue of people taking turns rubbing its nose.
Le Stinche — Five Centuries Under the Opera House
You're standing in front of the Teatro Verdi — a working opera house, where Florence stages Verdi and Puccini, tragedies sung by people in beautiful costumes.
Loggia dei Lanzi — The Gallery of Murders
Look at that grand arched porch off the corner of the square — the tall stone loggia crowded with statues, people wandering underneath, taking pictures.
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
Behind the cathedral, on the east side, is a museum most visitors march straight past on their way to the dome climb. Don't.
Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella
Step inside the doorway ahead of you, if it's open, and the first thing that hits you isn't a sight, it's a smell — a wall of it, herbs and rosewater and something older underneath.
Orsanmichele
That tall, square, blank-walled building ahead of you looks like a fortress that got lost on its way to becoming a church. This is Orsanmichele, and it genuinely could not decide what it wanted to be.
Orsanmichele / Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana
That tall, square, honey-brown building with statues standing in niches all the way around it is Orsanmichele. Most people stop for the saints.
Ospedale degli Innocenti
Look at the long, calm arcade running along this side of the square — a row of rounded arches on slender columns, so simple and so exactly right that you might not register you're looking at a landmark at all.
Palazzo Medici Riccardi
The building on the corner is trying very hard to look like it has nothing to hide. Heavy blocks of rough stone at street level, smoother and calmer as your eye climbs, a thick cornice across the top like a raised eyebrow.
Palazzo Pucci
The long, dignified stone front running down this street belongs to the Palazzo Pucci — and the Pucci family has been standing on this exact spot for something like six hundred years.
Palazzo Spini Feroni — Salvatore Ferragamo
You've reached Via de' Tornabuoni, and you can feel the change in the air — this is Florence's luxury street, the one every fashion house wanted an address on, the Renaissance's answer to a row of flagship stores.
Palazzo Vecchio
You're back on the great square now, in front of a blunt stone fortress with a tall off-center tower stabbing up from one corner.
Palazzo Vecchio — Hanged from the Windows
That blocky stone fortress with the tall off-center tower is the Palazzo Vecchio, the Old Palace, the seat of Florence's government for seven hundred years. Look up at the row of windows facing the square.
Piazza della Signoria
You've walked into the Piazza della Signoria — the main square, the political heart of Florence for seven hundred years, and, as a bonus, one of the finest sculpture galleries in the world, free of charge and open to the sky. Look around.
Piazza della Signoria — The Bonfire and the Burning
You've walked into the Piazza della Signoria — the political heart of Florence for seven hundred years, and one of the loveliest open squares in the world.
Pitti Palace
You've crossed the river, and the thing filling the square in front of you looks less like a building than a cliff face with windows. The Pitti Palace. Enormous, rusticated, deliberately overwhelming.
Pitti Palace — The Sala Bianca
You've crossed the river and you're standing in front of the Pitti Palace — and there is no missing it.
Ponte Vecchio
The bridge in front of you is wearing shops — the Ponte Vecchio, gold and silver glinting in every little window box that leans out over the water.
San Lorenzo and the Medici Chapels
Look at the front of this church. It's bare. Rough brown brick, blank and unfinished, like the builders knocked off for lunch five centuries ago and never came back.
Santa Croce — The Tombs Are the Lives
You've reached Santa Croce — the enormous church with the marble front, facing the wide square. Inside, it holds the most extraordinary collection of the dead in Italy. They call it the Pantheon of Florence.
Scuola del Cuoio — Santa Croce
Behind the great church of Santa Croce, through a passage most tourists never take, there's a long, light-filled room inside the old monastery where people are, right now, bent over benches, cutting and stitching and pressing gold leaf…
The Baptistery — The Gates of Paradise
In front of the cathedral stands a smaller, eight-sided building wrapped in the same marble, with a set of doors on this side that look like solid gold.
The Baptistery of San Giovanni — The Gates of Paradise
Right in front of the cathedral sits a smaller, eight-sided building with doors that look like solid gold.
The Bargello
This grim stone block with the battlements and the square tower has one of the darkest résumés in the city — a barracks, a courthouse, and a prison, with Florence's executions carried out in the little courtyard inside.
The Bargello — The 1401 Panels
You're at the Bargello — a blunt, battlemented stone box that spent centuries as a prison and an execution yard before it became the finest sculpture museum in Italy.
The Bargello — The House of the Rope
This severe battlemented palace with the tower is the Bargello. Today it holds the greatest collection of sculpture in Italy — Donatello's bronze David, early Michelangelo, and the two famous trial panels from the contest that launched the…
The Dome — Santa Maria del Fiore
Stand back and look up, past the striped marble, to the enormous brick-red dome sitting on top of the cathedral. That is the largest masonry dome ever built, and it has held that title for six hundred years.
The Duomo — Murder at the Altar
You're under the Duomo — Santa Maria del Fiore, the great striped cathedral with the brick-red dome. Fix your eyes on the wide floor beneath that dome, the open space under the lantern where the altar sits.
The Duomo — Santa Maria del Fiore
Now you're right underneath it. The Duomo — Santa Maria del Fiore — wrapped in green, white, and pink marble, with a bell tower beside it in the same candy stripes. Look past the fancy front, up to the top. That dome.
The Madonna de' Ricci — The Dung and the Shrine
The small church tucked along this street is Santa Maria de' Ricci, and it is one of the only churches on earth that exists because a man committed a crime. Not because of a saint, or a vision, or a relic.
The Uccello Clock
Step inside the cathedral, walk a little way in, then turn all the way around and look up above the doors you just came through. There's a huge clock painted up there — and something about it is wrong. It has a single hand.
The Uffizi
You're looking down a long, narrow stone courtyard that runs toward the river, hemmed by two matching wings and lined with statues of famous Florentines gazing down at you.
The Uffizi Gallery
You're standing at the mouth of a long, narrow courtyard that runs down toward the river, framed by two matching wings and lined with statues of famous Florentines. This is the Uffizi — one of the greatest art museums on earth.
The Vasari Corridor
Look up, along the top of the buildings by the river, and you'll see it — a long covered passage riding on brackets and little arches, running above the street and out toward the old bridge, with no visible way in from down here.
Florence Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Blood on the Marble
A pope's murder plot at Mass, a preacher burned where he'd burned the city's art, a poet sentenced to the flames. Florence's beauty had a body count — and every crime is in the records.
Florence Dressed the World
The city that invented fashion twice — the medieval wool and silk guilds that funded the Renaissance, then Ferragamo, Gucci, Pucci, and the 1951 show that made 'Made in Italy.' Two inventions, six centuries apart, on the same small grid of streets.
Florence in a Mile
The Duomo, the David, the bridge — a straight walk through the heart of Florence, with the one insane true story behind every icon. Where the Renaissance started, and why any of it is still here.
How to Build the Impossible
A reject block of marble became the David; a dome that shouldn't stand still holds; a 1401 contest built a genius by making him lose. A physics heist across the Renaissance, on foot, in about a mile.
The Family That Owned Florence
The Medici started as bankers and ended up owning a republic, a papacy, and immortality — four popes, two queens of France, a secret half-mile skybridge over the whole city. And the last of them gave every masterpiece to Florence forever, on one condition: none of it could ever leave.
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