Photo: Ščenza
Florence, Italy · Europe
Florence in the early morning: walking past the Uffizi queue
Florence is the Renaissance city: small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, dense with paintings and buildings that changed Western art forever, and now reliably packed by mid-morning. The trick is to be up earlier than anyone else.
By Ščenza
· updated · 5 min read
There is a stretch of the Lungarno, between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte alle Grazie, where if you stand at exactly 6:42 a.m. in late September the rising sun comes up the Arno and hits the river-front buildings at an angle that has not changed since Botticelli’s century. The river is still. The motorini have not started. The cafés are half-shuttered. The light is the colour of old paper. This is, for me, the Florence I keep returning for.
Why I keep coming back
The city is small. Most of what you came for can be walked in twenty minutes from one side to the other. The density of consequential Renaissance art per square kilometre is, simply, the highest in the world. You will see, in a single morning, paintings and buildings that shaped Western culture for five hundred years. And you can do this while having coffee from a real Florentine bar where the espresso costs one euro twenty if you stand at the counter.
Where to base yourself
Oltrarno (south of the Arno), specifically around Santo Spirito or San Niccolò. Quieter than the historic centre, still walkable, with artisan workshops, neighbourhood trattorias, and the Piazza Santo Spirito for evenings.
Sant’Ambrogio or San Niccolò, both residential pockets adjacent to the centre.
Avoid anywhere within four blocks of the Duomo as a base. Loud, touristed, restaurants are largely tourist-priced.
What to actually do
Visit the Uffizi at first opening with an advance ticket. The reservation system has been improved; book online weeks ahead for the 8:15 a.m. slot. You will have the Botticelli rooms — Primavera, The Birth of Venus — to yourself for the first twenty minutes. Don’t try to see the entire museum. Focus on rooms 8 through 15 and the Caravaggios upstairs.
Climb the Duomo cupola. Brunelleschi’s dome, 463 steps, with a timed entry. The climb is steep and there is no elevator but the moment when you emerge between the inner and outer shells, with Vasari’s Last Judgement frescoes a metre from your face, is one of the great architectural experiences in Italy.
Spend a morning at the Bargello. A small museum in a former town-hall and prison, with Donatello’s David (the bronze, smaller and stranger than the Michelangelo), Verrocchio’s David (Leonardo modelled), and one of the great rooms of Renaissance sculpture in the world. Almost no queues; everyone is at the Uffizi.
Walk the Boboli Gardens to Bellosguardo. The Boboli (entry from Palazzo Pitti) is the city’s Renaissance garden; continue up through the gates to the Bellosguardo hill behind for one of the best panoramas of the city without the crowds at Piazzale Michelangelo.
Drink an aperitivo in Piazza Santo Spirito. Around 7 p.m., the square fills up — locals, students, a few visitors, the church facade unchanged. Volume or Pop Café for the cocktails; the cheap rosé in plastic cups from the takeaway window is the more honest move.
Where to eat
Florentine cuisine is meat-heavy, peasant-derived, and unfussy. The Tuscan tradition is salt-free bread, deep ribollita soup, the bistecca alla fiorentina (a 1.2 kg T-bone, charred outside and almost raw inside).
Trattoria Sostanza (centre) — A 150-year-old institution; the butter chicken (yes, butter chicken — Tuscan, not Indian) and the bistecca. Cash and book.
Trattoria Cammillo (Oltrarno) — Old-school, white tablecloths, the crespelle (Florentine crêpes) and the trippa.
Cibreo — In several formats around its small square; the Trattoria is the casual entry point, the Ristorante the formal one.
All’Antico Vinaio — Sandwich shop with a permanent queue near the Uffizi. Excellent salumi sandwiches around 6–8 euros; eat them sitting on the kerb.
I’Brindellone (Oltrarno) — A working neighbourhood trattoria with the kind of ribollita that justifies a flight.
Gelateria della Passera or Vivoli for proper gelato. Avoid anything with brightly coloured piled mounds.
When to come
Late March to early May, or late September to October. Pleasant, not yet at full crowd density, the light excellent.
January and February are the cheap, quiet months and surprisingly beautiful for the colder light on the buildings.
July and August are unbearable: 35°C+, packed, and the Florentines themselves are mostly at the sea.
Practical notes
- Visa: Schengen.
- Money: Card universally.
- Transport: Walking. The historic centre is 1.5 km across at its widest. Tram T1 connects the airport and the train station.
- Pickpockets: Real around the Duomo and the Santa Maria Novella station. Standard front-pocket discipline.
- The Uffizi line: Book online. Walk-up is currently a 3-hour wait in summer.
- Florentine bread: Salt-free, by tradition. Tastes wrong on its own; correct with bread-and-tomato soups or with charcuterie.
- Caffè culture: Pay at the cashier first, then bring the receipt to the bar. Standing at the counter is cheaper than sitting at a table; this is not subtle, and it’s not a tourist trick — it’s a genuine pricing distinction.
A final thought
Florence has, over the past two decades, been at the centre of the broader Italian conversation about overtourism. Day visits to the historic centre now run to twice the local population on a typical summer Saturday. The Uffizi, the Accademia, the Duomo are at full capacity routinely. Apartments have been turned over to short-term rentals at a scale that has hollowed out the residential population of the centre.
None of this means you shouldn’t go. It means you should go thoughtfully. Stay across the river. Eat in neighbourhood places that are still serving Florentines. Walk in the early morning. See one museum a day, deeply, rather than five superficially. Buy something from the artisans in the Oltrarno who are still making leather and paper and silver in the same workshops their grandfathers had.
The city, for now, can absorb the visitor who is willing to slow down. The visitor who tries to tick boxes will leave thinking Florence is overrated. The one who sat in Santo Spirito at 7 p.m., on a Tuesday in late September, with a glass of Chianti and a copy of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, will be thinking about the next visit before the plane lands.
If you only have a few days
7 ideal things to do in Florence
The Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine
Oltrarno, Piazza del CarmineTimed slots; book ahead, mornings are quietest
Masaccio was in his mid-twenties when he painted the Expulsion here, and the gap between his Adam and Eve and everything painted in the century before is roughly the gap between a drawing of grief and grief. Masolino started the cycle, Masaccio changed the terms of it, Filippino Lippi finished it fifty years later. The recent cleaning lifted off centuries of candle soot and an eighteenth-century egg-gum layer and the colour came back. Michelangelo came here to copy. You may also copy, at whatever level you copy at.
Donatello's bronze David at the Bargello
Via del Proconsolo, between the Duomo and Santa CroceClosed Mondays and on two Sundays each month
Most people queue at the Accademia for the marble one. This is the other David — cast around the 1440s, the first free-standing nude bronze since antiquity, and you can walk a complete circle around him with no glass and no rope in the way. He is small, smirking, wearing a hat and boots and nothing else, and considerably stranger than his famous cousin. The building spent three centuries as a prison, which does something to the sculpture rooms that I have never quite been able to name.
Fra Angelico's cells at the Museo di San Marco
Piazza San MarcoMornings only — the upper floor shuts around lunchtime
Forty-four monks' cells on the upper floor, each with one small fresco painted for the single man who slept in it and for nobody else. The Annunciation at the top of the stairs is the one on the postcards; the cells are the reason to come. Savonarola's rooms are at the far end. Check the hours, which are short and have got shorter — I once turned up at two in the afternoon after a leisurely lunch and was politely turned around by a woman who had clearly done that a thousand times before.
Vespers at San Miniato al Monte
Above Piazzale Michelangelo; steps up from Porta San NiccolòLate afternoon, daily; be in your seat before it starts
Olivetan Benedictines have held this hill since 1373 and they sing Gregorian vespers inside an eleventh-century church every single day. No ticket, no booking, no photographs. You sit in the nave, keep quiet, and it runs about three quarters of an hour. Walk up rather than taking the bus, so that you arrive slightly out of breath — this turns out to be the correct physical state for the thing. The green-and-white marble facade is what Brunelleschi's whole generation grew up staring at.
The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
Piazza del Duomo, behind the cathedralAny time; reliably the emptiest room on the square
Ghiberti's original Gates of Paradise are in here — twenty-seven years of one man's life, ten gilded panels — along with Michelangelo's Bandini Pietà, the one he took a hammer to when the marble turned out to have a flaw in it. Brunelleschi's actual dome-building equipment is upstairs. Outside, several thousand people are photographing copies of objects that live in this building, while a handful of us stand indoors with the originals. Come here before you climb anything.
Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella
Via della Scala, near Santa Maria NovellaWeekday mornings
Dominican friars began growing medicinal plants on this site in 1221, and in 1612 one of them opened the counter to the public, which makes it a serious contender for the oldest pharmacy still trading anywhere on earth. The old sale room is frescoed, chandeliered, and smells of the alcohol-based rose water they say was invented here. You are under no obligation to buy a thing. I bought a soap I could not afford, felt briefly Renaissance about myself, and still have the empty box in a drawer.
Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio
Piazza Ghiberti, east of Santa CroceMonday to Saturday mornings; shut by early afternoon
Built in 1873 and still the market Florentines actually shop in, as opposed to the one with the upstairs food hall and the permanent sandwich queue. Farmers from the Tuscan countryside sell along the west side outside; the cooked-food counters inside feed people on their lunch break. Buy pecorino, bread and tomatoes, carry it to a bench, be happy. It is shut on Sundays, a fact I have now personally forgotten on three separate trips spread across three separate decades.
From a Split boy’s notebook
The Split lens
What reminded me of home
Renaissance stone city living above its own past. The Oltrarno artisan workshops — gold-beating, leather, paper marbling — are kindred to our remaining old-town craftsmen who restore stone, mend nets, build wooden boats. Both cities are losing the workshops faster than they're being passed down.
What Split could borrow
Florence supports artisan workshops in Oltrarno with rent-protected leases and tax credits to keep crafts working. Our remaining stone-cutters, klepar shipwrights, and old tailors are leaving because their rents are now luxury rents. The municipality could ring-fence a few old-town addresses for protected artisan use.
Who can take you
Tour operators & guides to try
A short, opinionated starter list — just my humble opinion. Verify before booking.
Context Travelspecialistwww.contexttravel.com →
Context's Florence catalogue is one of the strongest in the network — the Uffizi early-access walk with an art historian, the Renaissance-architecture walk through the Oltrarno, the Brunelleschi-dome focused architecture walk. The depth is genuine. Caveat: the Uffizi tickets must be booked separately; budget the additional €30+ per person.
Take Walksspecialistwww.takewalks.com →
Take Walks runs the more accessible end of Florence — the Accademia + David priority entry, the Tuscany day trips to Siena and San Gimignano with wine tastings. Group size 14–20 on the day trips, smaller in the museums. Use this if you want logistics handled and a reasonable guide. Caveat: don't book multiple consecutive day tours; one full day in the city with a Context guide is usually more rewarding than two with the standard format.
