Florence

Brunelleschi raised this dome in herringbone brickwork with no timber centring underneath it. The climb runs 463 steps and nothing lets you turn round partway, so once you are in you go to the top. Entry is only at the time you booked.

Built as the Medici offices, so the rooms line up along both sides of one long corridor. The two Botticelli rooms draw the worst of the crowd, and having them quiet means arriving at opening. Windows on the upper corridor look down on the Arno.

Most come for one statue, and the David is indeed what the display is built around. Four unfinished slaves stand along the corridor, bodies half out of the stone, and plenty of visitors linger on those. Without a booking the queue turns the corner.

The shops on the bridge were butchers until the smell had them swapped for goldsmiths in the sixteenth century. A private Medici walkway runs above them, joining the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace. In 1944 this was the only bridge over the Arno left standing.

Under the roofed loggia the sculpture stands with no barrier, within arm's reach. A round marker in the pavement shows where Savonarola was burned. The David here is a copy. The original is in the Accademia.

It is still the town hall, so the route passes rooms where weddings are going on. A narrow stair above the great council chamber lets you walk the timber frame holding up the roof, and the tower needs a ticket of its own. In rain the tower shuts.

Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli lie inside one church. There is a tomb for Dante as well, but it is empty, because Ravenna never handed the body back. The 1966 flood filled the nave, and a mark on the wall records how high the water came.

The garden is the whole hill behind the palace; walking to the far end takes an hour and the shade comes and goes. From the terrace by the porcelain museum at the top the Tuscan hills open out, and few people climb that far.

A hill church at the top of a long stair up from the city, its front worked in green and white marble. Late in the afternoon the monks sing vespers in plainchant, and anyone may walk in and sit down. The cemetery beside it looks over the city.

The shop still sells what Dominican friars once made from the herbs in their garden, and it has never moved. A former chapel serves as the sales room with frescoes left on the ceiling, and buying one small bottle buys the run of it.

A broad lookout square above the Arno's south bank, with the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio tower in one frame. The David in the middle is a bronze copy. The steps along the edge fill an hour before sunset, so go up in good time for a seat.

A fortress-like former prison and police headquarters, now filled with Renaissance sculpture. Donatello's bronze David and Michelangelo's early Bacchus are here. The queue is far shorter than the Uffizi's, and plenty of days need no booking at all.

The main railway station takes its name from this church. Alberti completed the facade of patterned white and green marble. On the left wall inside, Masaccio's Holy Trinity is counted among the first paintings to use true perspective.

The entrance sits on its own at the back of San Lorenzo. The New Sacristy holds Michelangelo's Medici tombs with the figures of Day and Night, Dawn and Evening. The Chapel of the Princes before it is walled entirely in inlaid coloured stone.

The central market under a nineteenth-century iron and glass roof. The ground floor is butchers, cheese and vegetable stalls; the upper floor is a food hall of counters that stays open late. The streets around it are lined with leather stalls.

The Medici family's first palace, where Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi wraps around the walls of a small chapel. Medici faces ride in the procession. The chapel is cramped, and only small groups go in together.

Originals removed from the cathedral and baptistery. Ghiberti's bronze panels for the Gates of Paradise are here, along with the Pieta Michelangelo left unfinished late in life. The combined Duomo pass covers it, so no separate ticket is needed.

The tower standing apart beside the Duomo, climbed on foot by 414 steps with no lift. Climb the dome and the dome itself is out of sight; up here it fills the view. The top terrace is fenced in with wire mesh.

A hilltop town just north of Florence, reached by bus 7 from Piazza San Marco. Etruscan walls and a Roman theatre survive, and the theatre hosts performances in summer. The lane up towards the friary looks down over Florence.

Brunelleschi's last church, its facade left as a bare plaster wall that was never decorated. The sacristy holds a wooden crucifix Michelangelo carved in his teens. In the evening the square out front becomes the Oltrarno's drinking spot.

The Medici collection of scientific instruments, including two telescopes Galileo built himself. Galileo's own finger bone is on display in a glass jar. It sits on the river just behind the Uffizi, an easy pairing.

Brunelleschi's arcaded loggia, counted as the first building of the Renaissance. Blue ceramic roundels of swaddled babies sit between the arches. Where the arcade ends, the little window where infants were left in secret survives, now bricked up.

A garden stepped down the Oltrarno hillside; from the top terrace the Duomo faces you head-on. As April turns to May the wisteria tunnel hangs heavy with purple. Far fewer people than the Boboli.

A bronze boar beside the old silk market loggia; rubbing the snout is said to bring you back to Florence, so only the snout shines gold. Let a coin slip from its mouth through the grate below and the wish comes true. The one outside is a copy.

Hand-sized arched hatches cut into the walls of noble palaces, through which the family's own wine was sold straight to passers-by. More than a hundred survive in the city. A few reopened during the 2020 pandemic and still hand out a glass or a gelato.