The Best 3-Day Itinerary for Florence: What to Do, Skip & Eat

Day 1: The Renaissance Heart

Morning — Accademia Gallery & the Duomo Complex

Start your first morning at the Galleria dell’Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David before the tour groups descend. Arriving at opening time (8:15am) means you’ll have a few precious minutes of near-silence in front of the statue — something that sounds small but feels enormous when you’re standing beneath a five-metre marble figure that has no right to be as moving as it is. The rest of the Accademia is worth a wander too, particularly the unfinished Prisoners series, which reveals Michelangelo’s working method in a way the finished works simply cannot.

From there, walk down to the Piazza del Duomo. The cathedral itself — the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore — is free to enter and should not be missed, but it’s the surrounding complex that deserves your time and money. The Baptistery doors (the so-called “Gates of Paradise”) are breathtaking, and the Opera del Duomo Museum houses the original panels along with Donatello’s Mary Magdalene, one of the most viscerally powerful sculptures you’ll encounter anywhere. If you have the legs for it, climb Giotto’s Bell Tower rather than the dome; the queues are shorter, the views are equally spectacular, and you’ll get a stunning vantage point looking straight across at the dome itself.

Afternoon — Piazza della Signoria & the Uffizi Gallery

After lunch, make your way to the Piazza della Signoria — the living room of Florence, effectively — and then into the Uffizi. Give yourself at least two and a half hours. The Botticelli rooms (Birth of Venus, Primavera) are the unmissable centrepiece, but don’t bolt through the rest. There are Caravaggios, Raphaels, and Titians that would be headliners in any other museum but quietly hang in rooms that visitors rush through on their way to the next big thing.

What to skip on Day 1: The Vasari Corridor — currently reopened after long restoration — is lovely but requires a separate booking and premium price. First-timers should save it for a return trip.

Where to eat: For lunch, head to the Mercato Centrale on Via dell’Arricciapelo. Upstairs is a covered food hall where you can graze freely across Tuscan pasta, fried food, and good wine without the tourist-trap pricing of the piazza restaurants. In the evening, the streets around Santa Croce are packed with genuinely good trattorias. Order pappardelle al cinghiale — wide ribbon pasta with wild boar ragù — which is the definitive Tuscan dish and rarely done badly here.

Day 2: Oltrarno & the South Bank

Morning — Pitti Palace & Boboli Gardens

Cross the Ponte Vecchio — pausing to take in the view from either side rather than just pushing through the jewellery-shop crowd — and spend your morning in the Oltrarno, the neighbourhood south of the Arno that still feels closest to how Florence actually lives. The Pitti Palace is enormous and contains five separate museums; don’t attempt to do them all. Choose one or two — the Palatine Gallery for portrait painting, or the Silver Museum for decorative arts — and spend the rest of your time in the Boboli Gardens behind. The gardens are a proper escape from the city’s stone streets, with terraced pathways, Renaissance statuary, and a view down over the terracotta rooftops that earns its entrance fee on its own.

Afternoon — Brancacci Chapel & the Oltrarno Streets

The Brancacci Chapel inside Santa Maria del Carmine is one of the most important sites in the history of Western art and sees a fraction of the foot traffic of the major museums. Masaccio’s frescoes here — painted in the 1420s — were so revolutionary that Michelangelo himself came to study them as a young artist. Numbers inside are limited, which makes the experience all the more affecting. Book ahead.

After that, simply walk. The Oltrarno is full of artisan workshops — bookbinders, leather craftsmen, restorers — and independent cafés that have never made it onto a travel list. This is where Florence stops performing and starts being itself.

What to skip on Day 2: The Piazzale Michelangelo viewpoint is beautiful, but if your time is limited, the view from the Bell Tower on Day 1 is comparable and requires no uphill walk or taxi.

Where to eat: Lunch in the Oltrarno — any of the small osterie on Via dei Serragli or the streets around Piazza Santo Spirito will serve you better than anything near the main tourist drag. In the evening, look for a buchetta del vino — a wine window, a small hatch built into the walls of old palazzos, originally used to sell wine directly from the cellar. Several have been revived and are a charming way to have a glass before dinner.