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Four trips in fourteen years, and we're still not done with it.
Four trips in fourteen years, and every single one has deepened our romance with Florence. It's not an exaggeration to call it one of our favorite cities in Europe — it has all of the glamour, shopping, and romance of Paris in a fraction of the footprint, which means less time on transit and more time actually living in it.
You like history? Welcome to the capital of the Renaissance. You like food? Every single neighborhood trattoria here is good — genuinely, consistently good, in a way that will ruin you for a lot of restaurants back home. Prefer a wine crawl? Florence practically invented the wine window: walk up to a little hole in the wall, ring the bell, get wine. Is your suitcase already too full? Get ready to abandon that plan entirely — traditional artisan clothing and leather goods here are shockingly well priced. One note: Italy dresses more conservatively than you might expect, and it's worth packing with that in mind.
Here's what four trips have taught us: wandering off the main piazzas in Florence isn't a risk, it's the entire point. This is a walled historic city that has figured out how to absorb modern traffic, modern intrusion, and heavy modern tourism without losing itself — and the streets one or two blocks back from the postcard views are exactly where it hasn't lost itself at all. Turn down a street that dates back three hundred years, walk into a shop that's been in the same family for a hundred of them, and you'll understand why we keep coming back.
We will be back a fifth time. Budget your visit accordingly — you won't see it all, and you're not supposed to.
Built from our own expensive mistakes.
We didn't book far enough ahead. The Uffizi, the Accademia, and the Duomo's dome climb all run on timed-entry tickets, and all three sell out during busy season. Book these before you land, not after — losing half your two-hour Uffizi window to a walk-up line defeats the entire point of keeping the visit tight.
We over-spent on “fancy.” Florence's rule of thumb, and one we learned the expensive way: the best meals here are at the small neighborhood trattorias, not the tasting-menu splurges. We don't regret every fine-dining night (see below), but if we'd trusted the little places from trip one, we'd have eaten better and spent less.
We tried to out-museum the Renaissance. You cannot do it. Pick one or two — the Accademia for David, the Uffizi if you're going deep, the Medici Chapel if you want the surprise — and let the rest wait. Florence isn't going anywhere, and neither is your stamina if you try to cram five museums into two days. You will come back.
We packed for a trip we should have packed for shopping. If Florence is early in your itinerary, under-pack on purpose. Plan to buy clothes, shoes, jackets, belts, and purses while you're here — these are pieces that will stay in your closet for years, not souvenirs you'll regret. Leave the room in your suitcase for them. One practical note: the average Italian man stands about 5'8.5″ (174 cm) and the average Italian woman about 5'3.5″ (161 cm), and the clothes are cut for that frame, not a taller one. Pants are usually the first thing to give it away — even at 5'11″, expect the inseam to run short. Size up in your expectations, try things on before you commit, and don't assume your usual size will fit.
Price does not automatically correlate to value.
Full disclosure: we're Marriott Titanium, and that status has been very good to us over the years. It's also gotten more expensive every single year — the loyalty is real, but so is the price creep, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
Here are 2 numbers worth sitting with: Florence has more than 5,000 listings packed into its 1.66 square miles. There is an option at every single budget, and — this is the part people consistently get wrong — price does not automatically correlate to value.
While we're debunking things: you do not need to stay dead in the middle of the walled city to “be close to everything.” Florence is not London. The entire historic center is completely walkable, re-walkable, and re-re-walkable in a single day, on foot. Once that sinks in, your options open up considerably — look at Oltrarno for a hotel with a rooftop view of the Duomo across the river, or a small boutique property tucked into a local neighborhood off the main tourist drag.
If your budget runs to $$$$, the four names that consistently earn it in Florence are the Four Seasons, the St. Regis, Hotel Savoy, and Belmond's Villa San Michele.
If your hotel room is, to you, mainly just a place to put a bed, don't pay luxury-property rates to sleep in it. Book a boutique hotel near one of the four above, sleep there, and enjoy their bar and spa à la carte instead. You get the experience without renting the whole building to have it.
The pinnacle of luxury accommodation and service in Florence, set inside a beautifully restored palazzo with its own walled gardens, excellent bars and restaurants, and a scattering of small boutiques on-site. The flaw, if you can call it one: it makes leaving the property to go explore the actual city genuinely difficult. It sits well outside the tourist center, just inside the old walls in a lovely neighborhood — still a very easy walk in.
fourseasons.com → Find it on the map →Remember that pro tip? This is it, in practice. Save roughly $2,000 a night over the Four Seasons and still land a lovely property: a nice bar, an excellent breakfast, well-appointed rooms. We stayed here over New Year's Eve 2025–6, and they set off fireworks in the park next door at midnight. The flaw: it's in a residential area — around the corner from the Four Seasons and a ten-minute stroll to the city center, not steps from it, so plan your days accordingly if you want to roll out of bed and into a piazza.
regency-hotel.com → Find it on the map →
We stayed dead in the historic center exactly once, back when the wee-staches were small. The proximity to every major sight was genuinely excellent. The flaw: city-center noise can make actually sleeping a real challenge. This is the trip that convinced us the “stay in the middle of everything” advice is overrated.
This is where we'd point most people. Plenty of 3- and 4-star boutique hotels here, plus a handful of luxury options, all a short walk across one of the bridges. The views, the quieter evenings, and the local flavor make that walk worth it every time.
Find it on the map →We have clients staying here in a week and will report back with a real review. On paper: a 3-star property with a rooftop terrace available to all guests, solid tourist-class accommodations, and an excellent location. Consider this a placeholder recommendation until we've seen it firsthand.
hotel-bb.com → Find it on the map →Want more options than our short list? Our full Florence map has every hotel we've scouted, stayed at, or have our eye on.
Pick one or two museums. That rule doesn't apply to anything else on this list.
The piazzas, the Duomo, and Piazzale Michelangelo aren't optional extras competing for your museum budget; they're free or nearly free, they take an hour, not a day, and every one of them earns its own stop regardless of how many museums you've already used up. Here's the thing about Florence: every corner of it is filled with history. Every church has a famous artist's or sculptor's work hiding in it somewhere. Every piazza has its own character, whether or not it's the famous one. Should you visit Piazza della Signoria? Yes. Should you pay twice as much for food that's half as good because you sat down at the first café you saw? No.
Don't just look at it from the piazza. Book ahead and walk up to the top of the dome for a completely different view of Florence.
Book tickets → Find it on the map →We loved it, but it can be overwhelming — this is a museum you can lose an entire day to if you let it. The da Vinci paintings make it worth the visit on their own. Pick a handful of the pieces that matter most to you and keep the visit to two hours or less. Remember: you WILL be back.
Book tickets → Find it on the map →
A must, if only for David. “It is truly impressive” undersells it.
Book tickets → Find it on the map →
The standout surprise of the trip. We had a private tour and were floored — there's a hidden room here with charcoal drawings on the wall attributed to Michelangelo himself. Can't recommend it enough, and it gets a fraction of the foot traffic the big names do.
Book tickets → Find it on the map →Michelangelo works inside a 13th-century palace, and far less crowded than the Accademia.
bargellomusei.it → Find it on the map →In a city that specializes in mega-churches, this one still earns the stop.
smn.it → Find it on the map →Inside Palazzo Spini Feroni on Via de' Tornabuoni. A must for any fashionista — the shoe designs alone span nearly a century of Hollywood clients, and it's a genuinely different kind of museum stop than the rest of this list.
museo.ferragamo.com → Find it on the map →The most famous piazza in Florence, a genuine Medici-era time capsule of statues. Go for the history and the view — just don't sit down at the first café you see there (see above).
Find it on the map →
Yes, it's a mega tourist stop. Go anyway — the view over Florence simply can't be beat. Watch your pockets and ignore anyone offering you “free” anything — the scam runs constantly up here, same as everywhere else in the city. Time it for sunset, let the Golden Hour do its thing, then head down into Oltrarno — our favorite neighborhood in the city — for dinner at a great local trattoria. It's also lovely up here at night — the city lit up below is worth the trip on its own — but double your usual caution after dark; it's a lot less crowded and a lot less lit than it is at sunset.
Find it on the map →Florence is best discovered on foot, and often by accident. It's an extremely safe city to wander — genuinely, walk without a plan and see where you end up. The usual big-city caution still applies: watch for pickpockets, and ignore anyone offering you “free” anything, always. Some of our best hours in Florence have had nothing to do with the list above — just an outdoor table in one of the “lesser” piazzas, a glass of wine, and watching the light change over the buildings for a few hours straight. Leave room in your itinerary for that piazza too; you won't find it on this list, and that's the point.
The Stache loves a good tour as much as the next person, but we've got a few notes.
Yes, the tourist traps are real, and they cluster exactly where you'd expect — but spend five minutes on Google Maps and you'll turn up hundreds of excellent trattorias that will make you seriously reconsider what you thought was a good meal back home.
A quick note: a few of these don't have a real website — just Instagram, Facebook, or nothing digital at all. That's not us being lazy, it's how these places actually operate. Addresses and phone numbers are on our Florence map.
Mercato Centrale Firenze — San Lorenzo. Before you sit down anywhere else, walk through here. It's an excellent stop for picnic supplies, for gifts, and — mostly — for watching how Florentines actually get to buy their groceries. Lucky them.
Everyday — these five get full write-ups because we have real opinions about them.
Michelin Bib Gourmand, mother-and-son run. The chef has earned his “Soup Nazi” reputation and the negative reviews that come with it — but the food is good enough to justify the attitude. The menu board is outside only; photograph it and run it through Google Translate before you sit down. Know what you want before you order, expect terse answers if you don't, and don't take it personally. You must call ahead for a reservation — no exceptions. They don't answer emails; phone only.
zebgastronomia.com → Find it on the map →Very highly rated, gluten-free options available (always confirm before you sit). The move: a sandwich here at sunset, eaten on Michelangelo's balcony — grab a bottle of wine and plastic cups on the way up and make an evening of it. The power move: watch the sunset, eat, then come back after dark for the view all over again. It's a different city lit up.
@gustapanino → Find it on the map →The quintessential Florence wine-window experience, and the food backs it up.
@cantinadepucci → Find it on the map →A well-reviewed Florentine steakhouse, and a great local experience in tight quarters — perfect for lunch right after the Cappelle Medicee.
bottegadifattoria.com → Find it on the map →Bib Gourmand, tiny, across the Arno. The restaurant is supplied directly by the farm that owns it. Reservations strongly recommended.
Michelin → Find it on the map →Also worth a stop: Trattoria Roberto dal 1973, Osteria Nolarium, Santabarbara Desco & Cucina, Trattoria 4 Leoni, L'Ortone, Il Latini, Ristorante del Fagioli, Trattoria Sostanza, and New Bridge Pizza Club — all good, all pinned on our Florence map if you want the details.
The food in Italy is already excellent. A tasting menu isn't a requirement here the way it might feel at home.
But if you're going to splurge anyway —
Bottura's collaboration with Gucci, in the Gucci Garden complex, chef trained under Pujol (CDMX) and a Tokyo kitchen. 50 Best, Michelin-starred. A great lunch stop — but the tasting menu leans too heavily on fish for the price. Go à la carte instead. This is a big splurge either way.
gucciosteria.com → Find it on the map →Michelin-starred, across the Arno, co-owned by a local farm so the farm-to-table claim is real. Creative presentation, excellent wine list. Very expensive.
saporium.com → Find it on the map →Florence's only three-Michelin-star restaurant. Haute Italian cooking, a genuinely impressive wine collection.
enotecapinchiorri.it → Find it on the map →Wine bars & cocktails
A note on wine windows. Yes, we know — the buchette del vino are having a moment, and by now you've probably seen a dozen. Here's the part that isn't on your feed: we were doing this before it was famous, and we have Covid to thank. Florence's wine-producing noble families (Antinori and Frescobaldi among them) cut these little arched holes into their palazzo walls back in the 1600s to sell wine directly to the street, tax collectors and retail licenses cheerfully bypassed. They sat dormant for a few centuries until 2020 revived them as a genuinely useful, actually-contactless way to pass someone a glass of wine or a coffee — and that's when we found ours, long before anyone was queuing up for the photo.
Do we have pictures of ourselves enjoying one, glass in hand, feeling very clever about it? Yes. Will you see them posted anywhere? No. Some dignity remains. Plenty of windows are pinned on our Florence map, but keep an eye out on your own walks, too — half the fun is the hunt.
Both well outside the tourist center, both worth the walk for an authentic, unhurried wine bar night.
vineriasonora.it → Find it on the map →A 50 Best cocktail bar with 200 years of history and its own century of Negroni-making — try one of their twists on the original.
caffegilli.com → Find it on the map →Gucci's cocktail collaboration: visually stunning drinks at prices to match. If you can snag the window table, it's worth it for the Piazza della Signoria people-watching alone.
gucciosteria.com → Find it on the map →A see-and-be-seen spot. The prix fixe menu is fine, but this is really a pre-dinner cocktail stop — go for a drink with the beautiful people and enjoy an interior that's even more beautiful than the crowd.
localefirenze.it → Find it on the map →Excellent cocktails and all-day light bites.
fourseasons.com → Find it on the map →We were lucky enough to stay at their Tuscany estate, an experience we'd recommend without hesitation. If the estate isn't in the cards, their Florence tastings still deliver a taste of that terroir — without the long, bumpy white-gravel roads to get there.
castigliondelbosco.com → Find it on the map →Sequenced roughly the way you'd actually walk it.
We could give you an exhaustive list — the map has dozens more pins than we're about to mention, and we're still finding new ones ourselves — but that defeats the point. Below is a walking tour of standouts. Everything else, including places we haven't gotten to yet, is on our Florence map.
Discounts run in one direction. Buy more than one thing at the small, family-run shops below, and you'll often get a discount for it — just ask, politely. Try that at Gucci and they will laugh you out of the store.
Not every famous name on Via Tornabuoni is still Italian. Gucci was founded in Florence, but the company itself has been owned by Kering — a French luxury group — since the early 2000s. If you want a big name that's still genuinely Italian-owned, look for Salvatore Ferragamo (Florence-founded, still family-controlled — see the museum above), Prada (still controlled by the Prada family despite the public listing), and Brunello Cucinelli (still run by the man himself). Worth noting: Versace just went back to being Italian-owned — Prada Group completed its acquisition of the brand in December 2025, after two decades under American ownership.
These names are worth the splurge if that's your thing — no judgment, it's ours sometimes too. But you won't find them written up below, because you already know them. What follows is what you probably don't.
Start here, inside the old dormitory of the Basilica di Santa Croce. A working leather school keeping traditional Florentine craftsmanship alive; one-of-a-kind pieces made on site.
scuoladelcuoio.it → Find it on the map →Exclusively Tuscan-made shoes, fine craftsmanship at a fair price.
gocciashoes.com → Find it on the map →
Only worth the stop if you're seriously considering a piece; this isn't a browsing shop. She-Stache has a real soft spot for their FOPE collection.
coi-firenze.it → Find it on the map →Practically next door to COI on the same street. Hand-embroidered linens, including their “naughty cocktail napkins.”
tafricami.com → Find it on the map →A small custom shirt maker with an NYC outpost, unmatched quality, made-to-measure from €165 — once they have your size you can reorder online, with turnaround as fast as 24 hours.
simoneabbarchi.com → Find it on the map →A 100-year-old, family-run glove shop. Two pairs in, and they've molded to the hand with wear.
madova.com → Find it on the map →Excellent locally made leather goods, high quality for a genuinely fair price.
annapitti.com → Find it on the map →A few locations around Florence, this one right in the same cluster. Specializes in Florentine marbled paper — the real, hand-marbled kind, not a printed imitation.
ilpapirofirenze.it → Find it on the map →Handmade prints on antique paper, still run by an elderly couple. A genuinely unique souvenir.
lacasadellastampa.com → Find it on the map →Handmade cashmere pashminas that source for other high-end brands. Very expensive.
falierosarti.com → Find it on the map →The finest linens, sleepwear, and children's clothing, still hand-stitched. Very expensive.
lorettacaponi.it → Find it on the map →Don't buy anything here. Just walk in and enjoy the vintage, old-world pharmacy feel of the place — the interior alone earns the stop.
smnovella.com → Find it on the map →Avoid any leather shop with someone standing outside trying to pull you in — that's not how the good ones operate. A real leather shop should smell like leather. If it smells off, it is off.
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