Buongiorno! A bit over a week ago, Garrett and I returned from our trip across Italy. We were able to visit Milan, Florence, and Rome in just about a weeks time, and were able to spend two of those days in Florence. I recently posted an overview of our trip, but wanted to do a post with more specific details of our time in each specific city in case you are planning your own Italian vacation. We really enjoyed Florence, and while you can spend a month there and still not see it all, we felt like we were able to find a lot of amazing hidden gems and get a good taste of Florence and it’s culture in the 2 days we got to spend there. Florence stole a pizza my heart (pun totally intended). The art, the architecture, the gelato… it was all on another level. So let’s get into all of the details!
Getting To, Getting Around, and Staying in Florence
Train From Milan to Florence
When we flew from Charlotte to Italy, we flew into the Milan Linate airport. From there, we took a high-speed train from Milan Centrale train stop to the Florence Santa Maria Novella train stop. It took just under 2 hours and was so easy and comfortable! We booked all of our train tickets through Omio and I had the Omio app on my phone to make it really easy to access our train tickets.
Hotel
We stayed at Hotel Balcony which was comparatively inexpensive to a lot of other options we were seeing. It is definitely a no-frills kind of place and we had a pretty small room, but the owner was so kind and helpful and you cannot beat the location. It was only a couple minute walk to the Duomo and many of the other places we wanted to visit. Plus, it was a relatively short walk from the Santa Novella train station, so we didn’t have to haul our suitcase along the cobblestone streets for too long once we got off the train!
Getting Around Florence
The thing I really liked about Florence is that you can walk anywhere. There is public transportation if you are staying more on the outskirts, but if you are staying in the action (which I recommend you do!), you probably won’t need to bother with figuring out the busses or trams in Florence.
Florence Itinerary
Arriving in Florence: Day 1
The first thing we did when we got to Florence was drop off our bags so that we could start exploring ASAP! We immediately sought out some wine and pizza at MaMMaMia Fierenze and take in our surroundings a little bit.
We were nearby Il Porcellino (aka the Bronze Pig), so we obviously had to rub his nose and give him a coin to get some good luck and ensure that we will come back to Florence one day! If you are nearby, make sure you put a coin into his mouth to let it fall through the underlying grating for good luck, and then rub the boar’s snout to ensure a return to Florence.
We had to start our daily gelato routine and found some at a place that I don’t even remember the name of (it was a tourist trap– don’t worry I’ll have better gelato recommendations to come).
Piazza della Signoria
While we were enjoying our gelato, we made our way to Piazza della Signoria. This is in front of the town hall of Florence and has a lot of statues to look at for free! It is adjacent to the Uffizi Gallery (which is one thing that we didn’t get to do on this trip). There is also a copy of Michelangelo’s David, so if you don’t get to make it to Accademia Gallery to see the real thing, at least check out the copy for free! Other notable pieces include the Fountain of Neptune, some original sculptures, as well as some copies of statues by Donatello.
Abduction of a Sabine Woman by GiambolognaFountain of Neptune
The line for the Accademia Gallery is LONG. If you are only planning on spending a couple of days in Florence, I recommend buying skip-the-line tickets and/or a tour for the Accademia Gallery. You can buy skip-the-line tickets directly from the Accademia Gallery, but they often sell out months in advance and very quickly. They are then re-sold by tour companies like who we bought from. All we had to do was meet the person in the assigned meeting place as directed from Viator, the guide gave us our tickets, and we immediately by-passed a VERY long line and went straight into the museum!
Original Plaster Cast Model of Abduction of a Sabine Woman by Giambologna in Galleria dell’Accademia
Accademia Gallery obviously has lot of other really impressive art. There is a lot of good explanations for the art around the museum which is very helpful if you don’t pay for a guided tour or an audio tour. The main attraction is obviously Michelangelo’s David though! I did not except the statue to be so big. I imagined it would be life sized but it is actually 17 feet tall!
Ponte Vecchio
After visiting David, we walked across the Ponte Vecchio which is one of Florence’s most iconic landmarks. Ponte vecchio literally means old bridge. It was built in medieval times and was actually the only bridge in Florence that survived World War II. It has shops built into the bridge like jewelers and souvenir shops, so it’s nice to window shop a bit while you walk it.
Photo taken on Ponte VecchioPhoto of Ponte Vecchio
As we made our way back to our hotel to get changed for dinner, we walked by the Florence Duomo and couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures in front of it. Don’t worry, we visited the inside later– we will talk more about it soon!
We had done so much walking at this point that I was ready to eat my body weight in some fresh pasta and carbs. We stopped into Pensavo Peggio which had great totally homemade food. It felt like the kind of food that someone would make in their home. The staff couldn’t have been lovelier too!
We started off with bruschetta which was pretty good. One thing to note is that they don’t salt their bread in Florence. You wouldn’t think it would make that big of a difference in the flavor of bread but it really does!
Garrett ordered the pappardelle al cinghaiale (wide/long pasta with wild boar) and I had the tagliatelle al ragu (like a fettucine with bolognese sauce). Both were so good!
Had to finish it with my favorite dessert of all time– tiramisu! This ended up being the best tiramisu we had the entire trip!
On our way out they offered us homemade limoncello on the house too! Pensavo Peggio is definitely a great hidden gem of a restaurant.
Day 2
We started off the morning early (as we do) and had to go get some coffee and a light breakfast at Caffe del 900. Italian breakfasts are generally quite light (which was tough for us), but this morning we were intentional about a light breakfast because we had a food tour to go to! If you are looking for an English breakfast with some protein to it, Caffe del 900 does offer that though!
Santi Michele e Gaetano
One thing we really enjoyed about Italy in general, but especially in Florence, is that because everything is so walkable, you will just see beautiful churches along your walk and you can just pop in to check them out! While walking to our food tour meeting spot from breakfast, we came across Santi Michele e Gaetano church. I thought this one looked really unique compared to other churches in Florence that we came across because it was quite a bit darker.
Just a tip though: Make sure you pack cathedral friendly clothes if you plan on visiting churches. Most of the cathedrals we visited were just ones that we stumbled across and just decided to visit, but it is important to know that they have dress codes and expect people to dress respectfully while inside. This means covering knees (for both men and women), covering shoulders (I always carried this light scarf/shawl with me when I was wearing a sleeveless top), and no crop tops!
Florence Food Tour
The food tour we went on started at 9 am and lasted 3 hours! We learned so much about Florence food culture and history. Our guide was so great too. I highly recommend a food tour whenever you travel– it’s one of our favorite ways to experience a new city! I did a full post about the food tour and everything we had already, so be sure to check it out if you are looking for some special foods to try specific to Florence.
But in short, this was one of our favorite things we did while we were in Florence!
Our absolute favorite thing we had on the tour was coccoli fritti. There are multiple places around Florence to get this treat, but if you take nothing else away from this blog post: do yourself a favor and visit Forno Canapa Di Bruschi Ivana to try the coccoli. It is a mini fried pizza dough sandwich with prosciutto and stracciatella cheese inside. INCREDIBLE.
The food tour ended on a sweet note of gelato which allowed us to meet our gelato goal for the day!
Gelato #2
Our guide taught us something that when you are looking for gelato, make sure you don’t get sucked into buying gelato from a place that has the massive mounds of gelato in the window. They look enticing and so pretty, but that is not the proper way to store gelato. Instead you want to find a place that stores their gelato covered in a freezer with a lid. You will find that the gelato tastes so much better at places that store it properly!
The Basilica di Santa Croce
Another great thing about food tours is that your guide can give you information and recommendations on so much more than food! Our guide told us we had to check out the Basilica di Santa Croce. She said she actually enjoyed it more than the Florence Duomo. After seeing the line to visit the Florence Duomo, we decided we would go check out the Basilica di Santa Croce first!
We ended up having similar feelings as our guide and thinking this church was SO cool and we liked it more than the Duomo!
Basically, this is where the tombs of the big names are. Santa Croce is the final resting place for Michelangelo, Rossini, Machiavelli, and Galileo.
It is 8€ per person for admission, but we learned a lot at this basilica and found it really interesting so it was well worth it for us! We do wish we had paid the additional 4 or 6€ for the audio guide, but we still learned a lot from the notes they have around the basilica.
The Basilica di Santa Croce was hit really badly by the Florence flood of 1966 and there is one area in the cathedral where there is marker of how high the water got. You can see how high it is with me in front for scale! A lot of art and important pieces all around Florence were affected by this flood, but this area and church was hit significantly hard.
Florence Duomo
After visiting Santa Croce, we decided that we should go visit the Duomo because we knew we would regret not doing it– even though the line was crazy earlier that day!
When we ended up going in the later afternoon though, the line was not bad at all and went by so fast! It was probably 1/4 of what it was earlier in the day. Our tour guide also confirmed that if you go later in the day closer to closing (we went 45 minutes before closing), the line is much shorter!
The Florence Duomo is obviously a must-see, plus it is free! There are other things part of the Duomo that you can do such as the bell tower, the dome, and the baptistry that are not free, but just going inside the Duomo is completely free.
We do regret not climbing the actual dome– although tickets for that sell out months in advance! Our food tour guide told us that she likes doing the bell tower climb more though. The line is not as long, its less stairs, it often doesn’t sell out as quickly, and you still get the amazing views!
After the Duomo we just did some walking. We walked to the Pitti Palace just to see it and stopped for an aperitivo before heading to dinner at Canto del Ramerino!
Our food tour guide gave me a list of restaurant recommendations and this was one of them. Garrett had the truffle ravioli and I had a ravioli with ragu sauce. Garrett’s was SO good. Mine was good too, but MAN I wanted to eat all of Garrett’s dish!
We had to finish it off with tiramisu obviously:
Leaving Florence: Day 3
This was really only a partial morning in Florence before we had to head to the Santa Maria Novella station to head off to Rome!
Since we were nearby the Florence central market, we also spent more time walking around there. We only got to breeze through it on our food tour, so it was nice to get to explore it more thoroughly on our own. They have everything from meats, cheeses, wines, sauces, pastas, produce, etc. Obviously we had to get a couple of bottles of wine to bring home!
And then that was about it! We got a breakfast at Tino Caffe which was very close to the train station. If you are looking for a heartier breakfast– it isn’t traditional Italian fare, but it will fill you up!
And that’s a wrap on the Florence portion of our Italian holiday! I’ll be writing a post on our Rome itinerary in the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled for that one 🙂 Ciao!
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[…] of men think about the Roman Empire on an almost daily basis… I have no idea why). Just like Florence, I’m certain you could spend a couple months in Rome and still not see it all– but all […]
[…] of men think about the Roman Empire on an almost daily basis… I have no idea why). Just like Florence, I’m certain you could spend a couple months in Rome and still not see it all– but all […]