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Florence, Italy Attractions

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Florence Attractions

Gallerie degli Uffizi (Uffizi Galleries)
The Uffizi is one of the world's great museums, and the single best introduction to Renaissance painting, with works by Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael Sanzio, Titian, Caravaggio, and the list goes on. The museum is deceptively small. What looks like a small stretch of gallery space can easily gobble up half a day -- many rooms suffer the fate of containing nothing but masterpieces.

Know before you go that the Uffizi regularly shuts down rooms for crowd-control reasons - especially in summer, when the bulk of the annual 1.5 million visitors stampedes the place. Of the more than 3,100 artworks in the museum's archives, only about 1,700 are on exhibit.

If you have the time, make two trips to the museum. On your first, concentrate on the first dozen or so rooms and pop by the Greatest Hits of the 16th Century, with works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, and Titian. Return later for a brief recap and continue with the rest of the gallery.

Be aware that the gift shop at the end of the galleries closes 20 minutes before the museum. You can visit it without reentering the museum at any time; if you plan to stay in the collections until closing, go down to the shop earlier during your visit and get the guards' attention before you pass through the exit turnstile, so they'll know you're just popping out to buy a few postcards and will recognize you when you ask to be let back in.

Reserving Tickets for the Uffizi & Other Museums - You can bypass the hours-long ticket line at the Uffizi Galleries by reserving a ticket and an entry time in advance by calling Firenze Musei at tel. 055-294-883 (Mon-Fri 8:30am-6:30pm, Sat until 12:30pm) or at www.firenzemusei.it (24/7). By March, entry times can be booked more than a week in advance. You can also reserve for the Accademia Gallery (another interminable line, to see David), as well as the Galleria Palatina in the Pitti Palace, the Bargello, and several others.

Museo Nazionale del Bargello
Past early Michelangelo marbles and Giambologna bronzes, the main attraction at the primary sculpture museum of the Renaissance is a room full of famous works that survey the entire career of Donatello, the greatest sculptor since antiquity.

Palazzo Pitti
The Pitti, with thousands of paintings hung thickly in the dozens of rooms of the Medici's old palace, all sumptuously frescoed and decorated, makes the Uffizi look like a preamble. Not only is room after room full of works by Raphael, Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Andrea del Sarto, and countless others, but once you get through the paintings, you've got the lavish Medici apartments, a costume gallery, a decorative arts collection, a modern art museum, and the baroque Boboli Gardens to see. You could spend a week here and still not be done.

Galleria dell'Accademia
The line stretches for blocks from the door, everyone waiting to get in and see Michelangelo's David, easily the most famous sculpture in the world. Once inside, you're also treated to his unfinished and powerful Slaves, along with works by Perugino, Giambologna, and Botticelli.
Palazzo Pubblico (Siena): The Museo Civico portion of Siena's medieval town hall preserves the masterpieces of the late Gothic Sienese school.
Museo Etrusco Guarnacci (Volterra): A staggering 600 Etruscan cinerary urns -- playing out in stony relief the Etruscans' views on death, art, and life -- fill dozens of rooms here. The tiny sarcophagi are topped with the enduring image of the Etruscan: bare-chested and comfortably pot-bellied, half reclining at a feast laid out in his or her honor.

Around San Lorenzo & The Mercato Centrale
The church of San Lorenzo is practically lost behind the leather stalls and souvenir carts of Florence's vast San Lorenzo street market. In fact, the hawking of wares and bustle of commerce is what characterizes all the streets of this neighborhood, centered around both the church and the nearby Mercato Centrale food market. This is a colorful scene, but one of the most pickpocket-happy in the city, so be wary.

Florence Activities

Ballooning over Tuscany: What better way to see Europe's most famous countryside than floating lazily over the olive- and vine-covered hillsides in a hot-air balloon with a champagne breakfast? Many outfits offer this indulgent pastime.

Museo Zoologico la Specola: As if a 19th-century natural history museum full of glass cases displaying stuffed specimens from all species around the world weren't enough, you've also got room after room of well-crafted late-18th-century wax models of human beings in just about every stage of dissection imaginable. These models are medical study aids from the days before genuine corpses for gross anatomy were available in every med school.

Museo Stibbert: This former private museum of an eccentric Scottish-Italian is made up of the general clutter of more than 50,000 random items and a huge collection of armor from all eras and world cultures, including an entire regiment of armored mannequins.

Prehistoric Lunigiana Statue-Stele (Pontrémoli): These mysterious tombstone-shaped statues were carved over a 3,000-year period starting about 3000 B.C. by an extraordinarily long-lived cult isolated in the Lunigiana. Some of the abstracted figures bear a suggestive resemblance to how ancient Roman historians described Celtic warriors from Gaul.

Etruscan "Sunken Roads" (Maremma): No one is quite sure why the Etruscans of the Maremma carved a network of passages, some more than 20m (66 ft.) deep, into the tufa surrounding Pitigliano, Sorano, and Sovana. Many stretches of the Via Cave have survived the millennia, and you can follow them sometimes up to a kilometer (2/3 mile) in what are kind of open-air cave tunnels.