Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CUT THE QUEUE: PRE-BOOKED TICKETS
In July, August and other busy periods such as Easter, long queues are a fact of life at Florence's key
museums - if you haven't pre-booked your ticket you could well end up standing in line for four hours
or so.
For a fee of €3 per ticket (€4 for the Uffizi and Galleria dell'Accademia), tickets to nine
musei
statali
(state museums) including the Uffizi, Galleria dell'Accademia (where
David
lives), Palazzo
Pitti, Museo del Bargello and the Cappelle Medicee can be reserved. In reality, the only museums
where pre-booking is recommended are the Uffizi and Accademia - to organise your ticket, call
Firenze Musei
(Florence Museums; 055 29 48 83;
www.firenzemusei.it
;
telephone booking
line 8.30am-6.30pm Mon-Fri, to 12.30pm Sat) or visit its website, or go to the ticketing desk at the
rear of Chiesa di Orsanmichele or at every state museum in the city except the Accademia (including
the Uffizi, Bargello, Pitti Palace and Museo di San Marco).
At the Uffizi, signs point pre-booked-ticket holders to the building opposite the gallery where tick-
ets can be collected; once you've got the ticket you go to Door 1 of the museum (for pre-booked tick-
ets only) and queue again to enter the gallery. It's annoying, but you'll still save hours of queuing time
overall.
Many hotels in Florence also pre-book museum tickets for guests.
TOP OF CHAPTER
1
Piazza della Signoria
& Around
Crammed with Renaissance sculptures and presided over by the magnificent Palazzo Vec-
chio, this photogenic piazza has been the hub of local life for centuries. Florentines flock
here to take a
passeggiata
(evening stroll), breaking for a coffee, hot chocolate or an
aper-
itivo
at the city's most famous cafe, Caffè Rivoire (
Click here
).
It was here that preacher-leader Savonarola set light to the city's art - books, paintings,
musical instruments, mirrors, fine clothes and so on - on his famous bonfire of vanities in
1497. A year later the Dominican monk was burnt as a heretic on the same spot, marked
by a bronze plaque in front of Ammannati's monumental but ugly
Fontana di Nettuno
bologna's equestrian statue of
Cosimo I
()
and the much-photographed copy of Michelan-
gelo's
David
that has guarded the western entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio since 1910 (the
original stood here until 1873 but is now in the Galleria dell'Accademia).
