🇮🇹 Italy · Central Italy (Lazio and Tuscany)
Florence is possibly the city with the highest concentration of art per square metre in the world. As the cradle of the Renaissance, it was here that, between the 15th and 16th centuries, an explosion of genius — Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael — and the patronage of the powerful Medici family changed Western art, architecture and thought for ever. Walking its streets means looking into the very heart of that cultural revolution.
The city spreads along the Arno, crowned by the unmistakable red-brick dome of the Duomo, a feat of engineering by Brunelleschi that dominates the whole skyline. Its museums and palaces hold some of the most famous works in the history of art: Michelangelo's David, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Leonardo's Annunciation. And all of it in a compact old town you can walk, where every square and every church hides a treasure.
This guide covers the essentials of Florence with a practical, warm eye: how to organise visits to its great museums to avoid the queues, what to see at the Duomo and how to climb the dome, where to find the best views, how to cross to the more authentic Oltrarno and how to use Florence as a base for discovering Tuscany. One golden tip: book tickets for the Uffizi and the Accademia in advance, because they have the longest queues.
Florence was born as a Roman colony, 'Florentia', founded around 59 BC by army veterans at a crossroads beside the Arno. After centuries of relative modesty in the Middle Ages, the city flourished from the 12th and 13th centuries thanks to trade and, above all, banking: Florentine bankers came to lend money to kings and popes across Europe, and the Florentine gold florin became one of the strongest currencies on the continent. That wealth funded extraordinary cultural development. In the 15th century, the Medici family, enriched by banking, took effective control of the city and became the great patrons of the Renaissance: driven by figures such as Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent, Florence attracted and financed the greatest artists and humanists of the day. Dante (father of the Italian language), Machiavelli, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo all came from here. The Medici governed, with interruptions, for centuries, first as de facto lords and later as dukes and grand dukes of Tuscany, until the line died out in the 18th century. Florence was briefly the capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy between 1865 and 1871. Today its Renaissance legacy, recognised as Unesco World Heritage, makes it one of the great cultural destinations on the planet. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Italy: Rome and Lazio, cradle of the Empire and seat of the papacy; the Tuscany of the Etruscans, the communal republics of Siena and Pisa, and Florence, the city that gave the world the Renaissance.
Read the history of Central Italy (Lazio and Tuscany) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Florence was born as a Roman colony founded around 59 BC, in the time of Julius Caesar, to settle legionary veterans on the banks of the river Arno. The Romans called it Florentia, a name usually read as 'the flowering one' or 'destined to flower', which some connect with the floral festivals (Ludi Florales) or with a good omen of prosperity. The city was laid out on the grid typical of Roman camps (the castrum), with its two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, crossing at what is now Piazza della Repubblica.
Its location was no accident: it sat on the Via Cassia, the road linking Rome with northern Italy, at a point where the Arno could be easily forded. That role as an obligatory crossing between the north and the centre of the peninsula would shape its commercial history for centuries. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Florence went through the dark centuries of the invasions (Goths, Byzantines, Lombards) as a minor city, overshadowed by others in the region.
The revival came in the late Middle Ages. Between the 11th and 12th centuries, Florence established itself as a free commune, an autonomous citizen government that gradually broke away from feudal power and from the Holy Roman Empire. That spirit of self-government, of merchant-citizens organised in guilds (the Arti), was the seed of the economic and cultural power the city would become. Like so many Italian cities, it lived through the wars between Guelphs (backers of the pope) and Ghibellines (backers of the emperor), conflicts that split its families and shaped even the life of its most illustrious son, Dante Alighieri.
What made Florence one of the richest and most powerful cities in medieval Europe was not its weapons but its money. In the 13th century, the city minted a gold coin that would change the continent's financial history: the florin (fiorino d'oro), first issued in 1252. For its constant gold content and its reliability, the florin became an international benchmark currency, accepted across Europe, a kind of medieval 'dollar' that gave Florence enormous commercial prestige.
The basis of that wealth was twofold. On one hand, the textile industry: the wool guild (Arte della Lana) and the dyers imported raw cloth, refined and dyed it with advanced techniques, and re-exported it as luxury fabric across the Mediterranean. On the other, banking: the great Florentine families developed sophisticated financial techniques — bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, loans to kings and popes — that made them bankers to half of Europe. Families such as the Bardi and the Peruzzi, and later the Medici, handled colossal fortunes.
That prosperity supported spectacular urban growth. Florence filled with palaces, churches and public works, and set about building its cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, a monumental undertaking that would last more than a century. The great Black Death of 1348, which decimated the population (Boccaccio describes it in the Decameron, set on the outskirts of Florence), was a terrible blow, but the city recovered and entered the 15th century in a position to lead the greatest cultural rebirth in the history of the West.
No family is as bound up with Florence as the Medici. Rising through banking at the start of the 15th century, with Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici they amassed one of the largest fortunes in Europe by becoming bankers to the papacy. His son Cosimo de' Medici, called 'the Elder' (Pater Patriae), effectively took the reins of the city around 1434, governing behind the scenes without formally holding office, in a republic that in theory was still free.
The high point came with his grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici, 'the Magnificent' (1449-1492), a central figure of the Florentine Renaissance. Under his family's protection there flourished artists and thinkers who changed the history of art: Botticelli, the young Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, along with humanist philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The Medici funded churches, libraries, sculptures and paintings, and turned Florence into the cultural capital of Europe. Patronage was not just a love of art: it was also prestige, propaganda and power.
The family had its ups and downs — it was driven out of the city more than once, as after Lorenzo's death and the episode of the friar Savonarola — but it always came back, and in time produced two popes (Leo X and Clement VII) and queens of France. In 1569 the Medici became Grand Dukes of Tuscany, turning the old republic into a hereditary principality. They ruled Tuscany until the dynasty died out in 1737. Their mark is indelible: many of the masterpieces admired today in the Uffizi, the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens come from their collections, left to the city by the last Medici, Anna Maria Luisa.
Florence is, by right, the cradle of the Renaissance, the cultural movement that between the 15th and 16th centuries rediscovered the legacy of classical Antiquity and put human beings at the centre of the view of the world. In architecture, the founding milestone was the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, raised by Filippo Brunelleschi between 1420 and 1436: a feat of engineering built without centring, the largest masonry dome in the world, which crowned the Duomo and became the symbol of the city and of a whole age.
In sculpture and painting, the list of Florentine geniuses is overwhelming. Donatello renewed sculpture with his bronze David; Masaccio revolutionised painting with perspective and volume in the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel; Botticelli painted La Primavera and The Birth of Venus. And above all of them, two universal titans: Leonardo da Vinci, trained in Florentine workshops, and Michelangelo Buonarroti, who sculpted his David here (1501-1504), the most famous marble statue in the world, today in the Galleria dell'Accademia.
This flowering was no accident. It rested on the wealth of banking and the guilds, on the patronage of the Medici and other families, on competition between workshops and on humanism, a current of thought that recovered the classical texts and exalted human dignity and capability. In a few generations Florence concentrated a density of talent hard to match in history. The result is treasured today in the Uffizi Gallery — one of the most important art museums in the world — in the Bargello, in the palaces and in the churches of a city that is itself an open-air museum.
After centuries of Medici rule and, once that line died out, of the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, Florence took part in the process of Italian unification (the Risorgimento) in the 19th century. In 1865, with the new kingdom still being built, Florence was chosen as capital of the Kingdom of Italy, a role it held until 1871, when the capital moved definitively to Rome after the Eternal City joined the kingdom. During that brief period as capital, the city went through major urban reforms that modernised its layout.
The 20th century brought dramatic episodes. During the Second World War, in August 1944, retreating German troops blew up almost every bridge over the Arno; the Ponte Vecchio was the only one spared, by tradition on express orders not to destroy it. And in November 1966, a catastrophic flood of the Arno swamped the historic centre, damaging thousands of works of art and books; the response of volunteers from all over the world — the famous angeli del fango, the mud angels — who came to rescue the heritage became a symbol.
In 1982, the historic centre of Florence was inscribed by Unesco on the World Heritage list, in recognition of its exceptional value as an artistic whole born of six centuries of creative genius and as the core of the Renaissance. Today Florence is the capital of the region of Tuscany and one of the great cultural destinations on the planet: a relatively small city that packs in an unmatched density of art, architecture and history, and that every year receives millions of visitors who come to walk the streets where the modern world was born.