Walkable Renaissance city, camera-enforced centre
Destinations › Europe › Florence
Florence is small enough that you can walk from Santa Maria Novella station to the Ponte Vecchio and on into the Oltrarno without ever needing transit, which is just as well because the historic centre is closed to unauthorised traffic and enforced by camera. The logistics that actually matter here are getting in from Toronto, because there is no nonstop, and booking the timed-entry sites far enough ahead to get the slots you want.
There is no nonstop from Toronto Pearson to Florence. Amerigo Vespucci (FLR) has a short runway that limits it to narrowbody intra-European aircraft, and it carries no intercontinental service at all, so every routing involves a connection. Three realistic approaches. One: fly nonstop YYZ to Rome Fiumicino (FCO), roughly eight and a half hours — Air Canada operates this year-round, while Air Transat and ITA Airways are seasonal — then take the Leonardo Express airport train to Roma Termini and a Frecciarossa or Italo high-speed service north to Firenze Santa Maria Novella, which is right in the centre. Two: fly the Air Canada nonstop YYZ to Milan Malpensa (MXP), then Trenord's Malpensa Express into Milan and high-speed rail south. Three: take a one-stop through a European hub straight into FLR, or into Pisa (PSA). If you do land at FLR, the named link is the T2 tram line, operated by GEST, which has its terminus at the airport and runs into the city of Florence. From Pisa, the named link is the PisaMover automated shuttle from the airport to Pisa Centrale, then a regional train to Florence.
You will mostly walk — the walled centre is genuinely small. Buses and the tramvia are operated by Autolinee Toscane, which took over the Florence network from ATAF, so you will still see ATAF branding on shelters and older maps. There are two tram lines, T1 and T2, T2 being the airport line. Tickets come as a paper single valid 90 minutes with transfers, as digital tickets bought through the operator's app, or as contactless tap-to-pay branded Tip Tap. Validation is mandatory and enforced: tap the paper ticket at the validator on the tram platform before boarding, or on board the bus, and an unvalidated ticket draws a real fine. On Autolinee Toscane's interurban and mixed-fare routes, contactless needs two taps, on and off — the operator warns explicitly that if you forget to tap off you are charged the maximum fare, all the way through to the terminus. For trains, the Italian validation rule still bites: a paper Regionale or Regionale Veloce ticket bought at the station must be stamped in the platform validating machine before your train departs, and travelling on an unstamped one means paying the full fare plus a penalty. Reserved high-speed tickets on Frecciarossa and Italo never require validation.
A strictly timed slot sold on the Brunelleschi Pass, which also covers the campanile, baptistery, crypt and Opera del Duomo museum over several days. Morning slots go first in spring and summer.
Timed entry, booked directly with the gallery. The Botticelli rooms are the crush point; the gallery also sells a cheaper late-afternoon entry, which conveniently coincides with the hour the Livorno cruise coaches leave.
David only, essentially, and timed entry is effectively required in season. Fifteen minutes of looking is worth the booking hassle; do not pad it out.
Cross the river for the Brancacci Chapel frescoes and climb to San Miniato for the best view in the city at sunset — free, and quieter than Piazzale Michelangelo just below it.
The Duomo, Piazza della Repubblica, Piazza della Signoria — everything on a first visit is inside a fifteen-minute radius. Suits short trips and anyone who wants to be standing at the Uffizi door at opening. Does not suit value or sleep, and absolutely does not suit arriving by car: it sits inside the camera-enforced ZTL, and from mid-morning the streets around the cathedral are a slow-moving scrum.
Across the Arno, and still the part of Florence with artisan workshops on the ground floor: gilders, framers, leather, restoration. Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Garden are here, and Piazza Santo Spirito is where the city drinks. Suits second-time visitors and anyone who wants to eat where Florentines eat, ten minutes' walk from the Duomo. Does not suit light sleepers on Santo Spirito itself, and the lanes are narrow with almost no pavement.
East of the centre: the Santa Croce basilica with the Tuscan tombs, the Sant'Ambrogio food market, and a neighbourhood that still functions as one during the day. Suits food-first travellers and families who want a proper market and somewhere ordinary to sit. Does not suit anyone needing quiet on a Friday or Saturday night, when the Santa Croce end turns into the city's main drinking strip.
Around the main station, which is the whole argument for it — if you are doing Siena, Bologna, Pisa and Lucca as day trips you will be in and out of here constantly, and arriving with heavy bags is painless. Does not suit anyone after charm; the blocks immediately west and north of the station are the scruffiest part of central Florence and the one area worth being alert in late at night.
The actual Florentine street food, not a tourist revival. Lampredotto is the cow's fourth stomach simmered for hours in broth, chopped, piled into a bun with salsa verde and hot sauce, and the top of the roll dunked in the cooking liquid. It is sold from the trippai carts — the traditional pitches are around Sant'Ambrogio, Porta Romana and near the Mercato Centrale. Order it standing up and do not overthink it.
Two markets in one building. The ground floor is the real thing — butchers, fishmongers, cheese, produce — trading Monday to Saturday mornings and shutting by early afternoon. The upper floor is a modern food hall that runs long into the evening. For a less touristed version, the Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio across town trades mornings every day but Sunday.
A thick-cut T-bone, traditionally Chianina beef, grilled hard over embers and served properly rare. It is priced and ordered by weight for two or more people, not as a single portion, and asking for it well done will be politely refused. The trattorie of Oltrarno and Santa Croce are where to do it, not the streets immediately around the Duomo.
Tuscan bread is unsalted, which sounds like a flaw until you understand it exists to be used: ribollita, the reboiled bread-and-black-cabbage soup, and pappa al pomodoro, the tomato-bread one, are winter staples on every trattoria menu. Schiacciata is the flat, oil-and-salt-crusted bread split and filled at counters across the centre — the giveaway is a queue of thirty people at an unmarked doorway. Finish with cantucci dunked in vin santo.
Galleria dell'Accademia for the David on a pre-booked timed slot. It is a far shorter visit than the Uffizi and getting it done at opening means you are not fighting the entire city for it. Walk south from Piazza San Marco down Via Ricasoli — five minutes on foot, straight to the cathedral.
The Duomo complex. If you are climbing Brunelleschi's dome, that slot is fixed and enforced to the minute, and it is 463 steps with no lift, entered from the Porta della Mandorla on the north side. The Baptistery, the campanile and the Opera del Duomo museum are all on the same square.
Walk five minutes north-west to the Mercato Centrale in San Lorenzo. Ground floor if it is still morning, upstairs food hall if it is not.
Walk south through Piazza della Repubblica to the Uffizi on a booked entry. Come out onto the Lungarno and cross the Ponte Vecchio on foot — it is the only Arno bridge in Florence left standing when the retreating Germans blew the others in 1944, which is worth knowing while you are being jostled on it.
Straight on into Oltrarno: Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Garden if you still have museum stamina, or the artisan streets of San Frediano and the Brancacci Chapel frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine if you do not. All on foot from the far end of the bridge.
Autolinee Toscane city bus 12 or 13 up to Piazzale Michelangelo for the view over the whole basin, or walk up the ramped garden path from Piazza Poggi if legs allow. Keep climbing past the terrace to San Miniato al Monte, which is the better building and has the emptier view.
The shell-shaped Campo and the striped Duomo, and a medieval city centre that feels older than Florence's. Take the Autolinee Toscane 131R rapid coach from the Florence bus station beside Santa Maria Novella — it runs the superstrada and drops you near the centre. The train is the trap: it is slower, needs a change at Empoli, and leaves you at a station well below the old town.
Under forty minutes station-to-station on a Frecciarossa or Italo through the Apennine high-speed tunnel, which makes it a plausible lunch trip rather than an expedition. Kilometres of porticoes, the Quadrilatero food lanes behind Piazza Maggiore, and food that many Italians will tell you outclasses Tuscany's.
These are two different lines out of Firenze Santa Maria Novella, not one: Pisa is west down the Arno via Empoli, Lucca is north-west via Prato and Pistoia. They are joined to each other by a short Pisa-Lucca line, so the efficient version is to do both as a loop rather than two separate returns. Pisa Centrale is about a twenty-minute walk or a local bus from the Campo dei Miracoli. Lucca is the walled one, with a complete Renaissance rampart you can walk or cycle right around the top of — if you only have time for one, take Lucca.
Florence is the easiest of these three with family, with two real caveats. The good news first: the historic centre is flat, and almost everything on a first visit falls inside a twenty-minute walk, so you may genuinely not need transit at all. The Uffizi, the Accademia and Palazzo Pitti have lifts or level access, and the cathedral floor is level, though it is worth checking the Baptistery and each museum entrance individually rather than assuming. The bad news is underfoot and overhead. The paving is stone flags and cobbles that punish small stroller wheels and turn slick in rain, and the medieval streets often have pavement barely one person wide, so you end up walking in the road with scooters passing. There is no metro; the T1 and T2 trams run out to Scandicci, Careggi and the airport and terminate at Piazza dell'Unità Italiana beside Santa Maria Novella, so they are useful for getting into town and useless for moving around the historic core, which is walking or nothing. And the famous climbs are genuinely hard and completely optional — Brunelleschi's dome is 463 steps with no lift, a narrow one-way spiral in stretches with no way to turn back partway, and it is not for anyone with bad knees, claustrophobia or a heart condition. Giotto's campanile is the same proposition. Nobody is missing the point of Florence by skipping both. Summer heat is serious and the stone centre holds it well into the evening; Boboli and the shaded Oltrarno lanes are where you go to escape it. Finally, if you are renting a car to see Tuscany, do not drive it into Florence. The ZTL is camera-enforced in lettered sectors with different active hours, every gate you cross generates a separate fine that arrives by post months later, and the rental company adds its own administrative charge to each one. Park outside the ring and walk or take the tram in.
Italy is on the euro. Cards work almost everywhere, including small trattorie. When the terminal asks whether you want to be charged in Canadian dollars, say no and choose euro — dynamic currency conversion is set by the terminal operator and always costs you more than letting your own bank do the conversion.
Carry a little cash for the trippai carts and market stalls. Restaurant bills carry a per-person 'coperto' cover charge and sometimes a 'servizio' line; both are normal and neither is a tip, so rounding up is all that is expected and nothing at all is not an insult. Bars charge two different posted tariffs for standing at the counter versus sitting at a table — check before you sit down with a coffee in a piazza.
Italian, with English widely spoken in the centre and near-universal in hospitality. The menu words worth knowing are coperto (cover charge), servizio (service), and etto — one hundred grams, which is the unit bistecca and market meat are quoted in. ZTL, on every road sign you will see near the centre, means limited traffic zone.
230 volts, 50 Hz, with Type C, Type F and Type L sockets. Type L is the Italian three-round-pins-in-a-row plug and it is common in older buildings, which is most of central Florence. Bipasso sockets take both shapes but you cannot count on getting one — bring a universal adapter that covers L. Canadian 120V-only appliances need a converter, not just an adapter.
Safe to drink throughout Florence and Tuscany. Restaurants will default to selling you bottled; ask for 'acqua del rubinetto' if you would rather not. The city also runs public drinking fountains, including some that dispense chilled still and sparkling water — bring a refillable bottle, especially in summer.
Global Affairs Canada flags pickpocketing and bag-snatching at Italian stations and tourist sites; in Florence that means Santa Maria Novella station, the crush on the Ponte Vecchio and the San Lorenzo market lanes. The specific local approach is the friendship bracelet — someone ties a string to your wrist as a 'gift' and then demands payment, usually near San Lorenzo or on the cathedral steps. Keep your hands to yourself and keep walking. Scooter bag-snatching happens along the Lungarno. And buying counterfeit goods from street sellers carries a fine for the buyer, not only the seller.
April to early June and September into October. July and August are hot and the centre is at its most compressed — Florence sits in the Arno valley with no sea breeze, so the heat sits on the city. January and February are genuinely quiet and the major museums are a pleasure. Florence is not a cruise port itself, but it is one of Europe's most heavily worked cruise excursions: ships calling at Livorno run coach day-trips in on a fixed window, which is precisely why the Uffizi, Accademia and Duomo queues balloon from late morning and thin noticeably from mid-afternoon. Plan your ticketed entries early or late and use the middle of the day for the Oltrarno.
Compare the ways to get there, then build a day-by-day plan.
There is no nonstop from Toronto Pearson to Florence. Amerigo Vespucci (FLR) has a short runway that limits it to narrowbody intra-European aircraft, and it carries no intercontinental service at all, so every routing involves a connection. Three realistic approaches. One: fly nonstop YYZ to Rome Fiumicino (FCO), roughly eight and a half hours — Air Canada operates this year-round, while Air Transat and ITA Airways are seasonal — then take the Leonardo Express airport train to Roma Termini and a Frecciarossa or Italo high-speed service north to Firenze Santa Maria Novella, which is right in the centre. Two: fly the Air Canada nonstop YYZ to Milan Malpensa (MXP), then Trenord's Malpensa Express into Milan and high-speed rail south. Three: take a one-stop through a European hub straight into FLR, or into Pisa (PSA). If you do land at FLR, the named link is the T2 tram line, operated by GEST, which has its terminus at the airport and runs into the city of Florence. From Pisa, the named link is the PisaMover automated shuttle from the airport to Pisa Centrale, then a regional train to Florence.
You will mostly walk — the walled centre is genuinely small. Buses and the tramvia are operated by Autolinee Toscane, which took over the Florence network from ATAF, so you will still see ATAF branding on shelters and older maps. There are two tram lines, T1 and T2, T2 being the airport line. Tickets come as a paper single valid 90 minutes with transfers, as digital tickets bought through the operator's app, or as contactless tap-to-pay branded Tip Tap. Validation is mandatory and enforced: tap the paper ticket at the validator on the tram platform before boarding, or on board the bus, and an unvalidated ticket draws a real fine. On Autolinee Toscane's interurban and mixed-fare routes, contactless needs two taps, on and off — the operator warns explicitly that if you forget to tap off you are charged the maximum fare, all the way through to the terminus. For trains, the Italian validation rule still bites: a paper Regionale or Regionale Veloce ticket bought at the station must be stamped in the platform validating machine before your train departs, and travelling on an unstamped one means paying the full fare plus a penalty. Reserved high-speed tickets on Frecciarossa and Italo never require validation.
April to early June and September into October. July and August are hot and the centre is at its most compressed — Florence sits in the Arno valley with no sea breeze, so the heat sits on the city. January and February are genuinely quiet and the major museums are a pleasure. Florence is not a cruise port itself, but it is one of Europe's most heavily worked cruise excursions: ships calling at Livorno run coach day-trips in on a fixed window, which is precisely why the Uffizi, Accademia and Duomo queues balloon from late morning and thin noticeably from mid-afternoon. Plan your ticketed entries early or late and use the middle of the day for the Oltrarno.