Florence concentrates. Where Rome sprawls and Paris unfolds in layers, Florence compresses everything into a walkable density that rewards patience and punishes the itinerary that tries to see it all.
We had two nights in October 2019, part of a longer journey that had begun in Valencia and continued through Barcelona before crossing into France. We arrived by train from Geneva, through the Swiss Alps via Milan — a long rail day that deposited us in the early afternoon at Firenze Santa Maria Novella.
Our apartment was just off the piazza of Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, close enough to the main attractions to walk everywhere, far enough from the Duomo to arrive on our own terms. We dropped our bags and went straight out.
The Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) came into view as we turned down the cobbled street toward the historic center: first the red tile of Brunelleschi’s dome, then the full façade of green, white, and pink marble below it — the tricolore of faith, hope, and charity, the same symbolic palette that would later inspire the Italian flag.
The cathedral stood without a roof for nearly two centuries while the city waited for someone to figure out how to span it. When Brunelleschi solved the problem in the 15th century, he did it without scaffolding, using a double-shell structure and a herringbone brick pattern of his own invention. Standing below it, the scale makes itself known slowly — you keep looking up longer than planned.
In the Piazza del Duomo, a cluster of people surrounded the octagonal Baptistery to view Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise — the gilded bronze doors that took twenty-seven years to complete, now a replica; the originals are preserved in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo nearby. Around the corner, the queue for the cathedral stretched along the marble flank of the building. We had arrived at midday, when the energy was at its most compressed. The lesson presented itself immediately.
From the Duomo, we continued to Piazza della Signoria and the Palazzo Vecchio — the medieval fortress-palace that has anchored Florentine civic life since the 13th century. The Uffizi Gallery frames one side of the piazza, sculptures fill the open-air Loggia dei Lanzi beside it. The concentration of works in this single square — originals and copies together, outdoors and accessible — is something that doesn’t fully register until you’ve stood in it.
What’s remarkable is how naturally the piazza holds it all. What’s less manageable is the crowd volume at midday, which the city is working to address.
Crossing the river offered a change of pace. The Ponte Vecchio at midday still required patience — the medieval bridge, its shop stalls rebuilt after the Arno flood of 1966, narrows pedestrian movement to a slow-moving corridor.
On the Ponte Santa Trinita just beyond it, a man from Senegal stopped the boys as we passed. He tied handmade bracelets to their wrists, speaking compellingly about football and his life’s challenges, working the kind of appeal that is simultaneously genuine and practiced. Aaron watched; I listened. I ended up giving him a couple of euros for a coffee without purchasing anything further, and he sent us on our way warmly, telling the boys to keep their bracelets.
It’s a moment that sits in a tension I’ve thought about since — the desire to help a genuinely complicated situation, and the awareness that a tourist’s impulse toward generosity doesn’t resolve the conditions that put someone on a bridge selling bracelets to strangers. Travel is a privileged position. Maintaining a grounded perspective inside that privilege is the ongoing work.
From the bridge, the view back toward the Ponte Vecchio across the Arno is one of the city’s most considered compositions — the bridge in the middle distance, the hills beyond, the water catching the afternoon light. We stood there longer than expected.
We crossed back for lunch near our apartment by Santa Maria Novella, where Osteria Belle Donne served classic Italian specialties in a historic setting. They welcomed us warmly into their compact space, though with the caveat that they cater primarily to locals — English was not expected. That framing was itself a recommendation.
Back through the Centro Storico, we navigated by side streets to avoid the midday crowds — turning down narrow medieval lanes, past residential buildings, the occasional open courtyard glimpsed through an archway — and came out at Piazza di Santa Croce. A wide open square in front of the Gothic basilica, bells sounding at intervals, less trafficked than the main plazas, with its own particular calm. The cloister courtyard behind the church, nearly hidden behind the main façade, was the kind of pause that the city keeps offering to those willing to look for it.
Not far from Santa Croce, we found Vivoli, the gelato shop we’d been told to seek out. The same family has made it for four generations, with the same commitment to quality ingredients over quantity. We went more than once. The combination of berry sorbetto with fior di latte, or pistachio with dark chocolate, is the kind of simple refinement that characterizes how Florence approaches pleasure across every category — the standard held quietly, without announcement.
Later, we crossed the river again, this time via Ponte alle Grazie, and climbed the steep hill to Forte di Belvedere. The Oltrarno — the neighborhood south of the river — operates at a different pace than the historic center: artisan workshops, smaller restaurants, residential streets. The Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Pitti lay below us as we climbed, the first formal Italian garden in Europe, the model from which royal gardens across the continent were later derived. The south bank rewards the extra walk across the river, and it substantially reduces the density of the tourist experience without reducing the quality of it.
At the top, we arrived to find a private party already underway — we wandered in, no one seemed to mind, and found our own vantage points. The cloud cover held the sunset back, but the light that remained did something else: certain features of the city below came forward in a warm incandescent glow, everything else softening around them. It was the version of Florence that doesn’t appear in the photographs — unhurried, almost private, the city at rest.
From there we went to dinner, also on the south side of the river, at Trattoria Cammillo in the Oltrarno, where the family’s third-generation chef prepares traditional Florentine dishes that change with the season.
In October, the white truffles were in. I ordered taglierini with white truffle and mentioned adding porcini mushrooms. The waiter, with the particular authority of someone who has seen this request many times, firmly declined on my behalf. The mushrooms would compete with the truffle. I didn’t question him. What arrived was handmade pasta under a shaving of something that smelled like damp earth and autumn forest — simple to the point of austerity, and extraordinary because of it.
The bistecca alla Fiorentina that followed, from local Chianina beef, was the most flavorful T-bone I’ve had: a cut I would not normally order, taken on the waiter’s suggestion after he had already demonstrated he knew what he was talking about. Florence teaches restraint as a form of luxury, and sometimes it takes a waiter with opinions to demonstrate the point.
Walking back, we crossed Ponte Santa Trinita again, this time in the calm of night — the vendors gone, no crowds, just the Ponte Vecchio aglow over the dark water of the Arno. The same bridge that had asked something of us that afternoon gave something back in the quiet of the evening.
Like the night, mornings bring a different Florence. Before the tour groups arrive, the Duomo piazza holds a different quality — the marble catching the early light, the scale of the dome more legible without crowds for comparison. The main sights of Il Centro Storico are best experienced in those early hours or after the groups begin to thin in the late afternoon. It is the rhythm Florence actually supports, and the city is generous to those who follow it.
Florence receives upward of ten million visitors annually in a historic center compact enough to walk across in thirty minutes. The pressure of that volume is visible at midday — busloads concentrated around the main sights, vendors filling the spaces between the crowds. Measures are slowly taking shape — limiting tour group timing, promoting the south bank and lesser-known neighborhoods, building toward a version of tourism that doesn’t hollow out the place it ostensibly celebrates. What helps most is what has always helped most — arriving with more time than you think you need and moving at a pace that lets the city come into focus.
The next morning we walked through the market streets in front of Mercato Centrale, past the unfinished façade of Basilica di San Lorenzo — Brunelleschi’s design, never completed on the exterior — and through Piazza San Marco before making our way to the station to catch the Frecciarossa south to Rome for the final leg of the journey.
Two nights in Florence is not enough. It’s enough to understand why the city earns its reputation and to begin to see past it — to find the Oltrarno, the early morning piazza, the waiter who won’t let you make the wrong order. It’s enough to know what you missed.
The Duomo interior, the Vasari Corridor, the neighborhoods that require more than two days to begin to read — these stayed on the list. I’m planning my return, this time to study Italian in a city I’ve long considered one of Europe’s most architecturally significant.
Aaron and the boys have their Italian dual citizenship by ancestry; mine comes by marriage, and requires a language proficiency exam. Florence felt like the right place to prepare for it — the city where the Italian language began, where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio wrote in the Tuscan vernacular that became the foundation of standard Italian, and where the language remains at its most pure. A city that has always rewarded the slower pace, and that I’ve been meaning to give more time to since 2019.
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Florence connects to the Italian Peninsula Atlas.
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