5 Days in Florence

The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore took almost 150 years to build, and for decades it had a hole where the dome should be, because nobody knew how to span it. In 1418 Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith with no formal training as an architect, won the competition for it, and between 1420 and 1436 he had raised the largest brick dome ever built, without the wooden scaffolding everyone thought was needed, using two shells and a herringbone pattern of bricks that he never fully explained. It's still the largest masonry dome in the world.

Climb it: 463 steps up narrow passages between the two shells, passing close to the huge fresco of the Last Judgment painted inside, to the lantern at the top. Down in the cathedral, it was here, during Mass on 26 April 1478, that the Pazzi family stabbed Giuliano de' Medici to death in their plot to overthrow the family. His brother Lorenzo, wounded, escaped into the sacristy, and the revenge that followed was brutal.

The octagonal Baptistery in front of the cathedral is older than it looks, and Florentines once believed it was a Roman temple. Dante was baptized here. In 1401 the city held a competition for a new set of bronze doors, which a young Lorenzo Ghiberti won, beating Brunelleschi, who went off to Rome in a huff. Ghiberti then spent 27 years, from 1425 to 1452, on the east doors, ten gilded panels of the Old Testament so beautiful that Michelangelo is said to have called them the Gates of Paradise.

The doors on the building are copies. The originals, restored and glowing, are in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo behind the cathedral, together with Donatello's haunting wooden Mary Magdalene and the Pietà that Michelangelo carved for his own tomb, then attacked with a hammer.

Walk down Via dei Calzaiuoli towards the Signoria and duck into Via dei Cimatori, where I Fratellini has been selling sandwiches and wine through a doorway barely wider than a man since 1875. It's a vinaio, the old Florentine wine shop where workers stopped for a glass and a bite. Choose a small panino (finocchiona sausage, pecorino, truffle cream), take a glass of Chianti, and eat standing in the street, putting your glass back on the little racks on the wall when you're done.

A few streets away, All'Antico Vinaio makes huge sandwiches of schiacciata, the local flatbread, and has a queue of 30-45 minutes to match. Locals will tell you it isn't worth the wait.

The L-shaped Piazza della Signoria was the political heart of the Florentine Republic, and it's still the town hall square. The copy of Michelangelo's David by the door of Palazzo Vecchio stands where the original stood from 1504 until 1873, and the Loggia dei Lanzi next to it is an open-air gallery of sculpture, with Cellini's bronze Perseus holding up the head of Medusa. In the pavement in front of the fountain, a round plaque marks where the friar Girolamo Savonarola, who had ruled Florence and burned its "vanities", was hanged and burned on 23 May 1498.

Inside Palazzo Vecchio, the vast Hall of the Five Hundred was built for the Republic's great council and then covered by Vasari with paintings of the victories of Cosimo I de' Medici, who moved in as duke in 1540. Upstairs are the ducal apartments, the tiny painted study of Francesco I, and a room of maps. The tower, 94 meters tall, has its own ticket.

Walk under the long arcade of the Uffizi to the river and the Ponte Vecchio, the "old bridge", rebuilt by 1345 after a flood swept the old one away in 1333. Its shops used to belong to butchers and tanners, who threw their waste into the Arno, until in the 1590s Grand Duke Ferdinando I threw them out and gave the bridge to goldsmiths, who are still there. Along the top runs the Vasari Corridor, a private passage built in 1565 so the Medici could walk from their offices to their palace without mixing with the people below.

For the classic photo of it, walk one bridge west to the Ponte Santa Trinita. On the night of 3-4 August 1944, the retreating German army blew up every bridge in Florence except this one. To block it, they destroyed the medieval houses at each end instead.

Cross the river and walk east through San Niccolò, a village-like corner of shops and bars, then climb the Rampe del Poggi, the stepped ramps up the hill, to Piazzale Michelangelo. The square was laid out in 1869 by Giuseppe Poggi, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy, and its view over the whole city, the dome rising from a sea of red roofs with the hills of Fiesole behind, is the one on every postcard.

It's busy and there's a car park in the middle, but at sunset nobody minds. Find a spot on the steps and watch the city turn gold and then pink. For a similar view without the coaches, the terraced Bardini Garden on Costa San Giorgio, on the walk up from San Niccolò, is the locals' choice in the daytime.

Five minutes further up the hill is San Miniato al Monte, a Romanesque church of green and white marble begun in 1013 over the grave of Florence's first martyr. It's one of the most beautiful churches in Tuscany and far quieter than the square below. The Olivetan monks who live here still sing their services in Gregorian chant.

Come for vespers and sit in the dim church while the monks sing in the crypt. Then walk out onto the terrace for the view of the city lit up at night.

Walk back down to the river for a bistecca alla fiorentina, the T-bone steak of Florence: at least a kilo of beef, often from the white Chianina cattle of Tuscany, grilled over coals so it's charred outside and very rare inside. It's priced by weight, often 45-70 EUR a kilo, and one steak is for two people. Nobody will cook it well done, so don't ask.

Buca dell'Orafo, a tiny cellar trattoria in an old goldsmith's workshop under an arch next to the Ponte Vecchio, has been serving it for decades. It's open for dinner Monday to Saturday and has its own wine window in the wall. Book ahead. On a weekday, Trattoria Sostanza near Santa Maria Novella, open since 1869, is the other classic for steak.

The Uffizi was built by Vasari from 1560 as offices, uffizi, for Cosimo I's government, and the Medici filled its top floor with their art. It's now one of the greatest galleries in the world. Go chronologically: Giotto and Cimabue's gold-ground Madonnas, then the early Renaissance, then the rooms everyone comes for, with Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera. After them come Leonardo's Annunciation, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, the only finished panel painting by him anyone is sure of, Raphael, Titian's Venus of Urbino and, downstairs, Caravaggio.

In 1993, on the night of 27 May, a Mafia car bomb exploded in Via dei Georgofili right behind the gallery, killing five people and damaging hundreds of works. A small olive tree in the street marks the place.

For lunch, eat like a Florentine worker: a panino al lampredotto, from a trippaio, one of the green-and-white tripe carts that have stood in the city's squares for generations. Lampredotto is the fourth stomach of the cow, slow-cooked in a broth with tomato, onion and celery, chopped, stuffed into a bun, topped with green sauce and chili oil, and the top of the bun dipped in the broth (bagnato). It costs about 5 EUR.

It sounds worse than it is: soft, rich and very good. The Trippaio del Porcellino by the Mercato Nuovo loggia and L'Antico Trippaio in Piazza dei Cimatori are both a few minutes from the Uffizi.

The Bargello is a grim medieval fortress that served as the city's police headquarters and prison, where executions took place in the courtyard. It's now Italy's great museum of sculpture, and a calm place after the Uffizi crowds. Upstairs is Donatello's bronze David, made in the 1440s, the first free-standing nude since antiquity, a boy in a hat with a smile that has unsettled people for 600 years. Downstairs is Michelangelo's drunken Bacchus, his first big statue.

On the way, look into Orsanmichele, an old grain market turned church, whose outside niches were filled with statues by Donatello, Ghiberti and Verrocchio, paid for by the city's guilds.

The great Franciscan church of Santa Croce is where Italy buries its heroes. Michelangelo lies here, in a tomb by Vasari, and so do Galileo, Machiavelli and the composer Rossini. Dante has a grand monument too, but it's empty: Florence exiled him in 1302, he died in Ravenna, and Ravenna has never given him back.

Look for Giotto's frescoes of the life of St Francis in the chapels behind the altar, and walk through the cloister to the Pazzi Chapel, a small, perfect room designed by Brunelleschi. In the refectory is Cimabue's Crucifix, ruined in the flood of 4 November 1966, when the Arno rose almost five meters in the square. The young volunteers from all over the world who dug the city's art out of the mud became known as the "mud angels".

Florentines claim gelato, crediting Bernardo Buontalenti, the Medici court architect, with serving the first one at a 16th-century banquet. It's a legend, but the city takes ice cream seriously. A few streets from Santa Croce, in a lane off Via Ghibellina, Vivoli opened as a dairy in 1929 and started making gelato in 1932, and it's still run by the same family. Try the rice gelato or the coffee and cream.

Good gelato is kept under metal lids or in flat tubs, not piled high in bright colors, and pistachio should be a dull green, not neon.

East of Santa Croce is Sant'Ambrogio, a neighborhood of locals around a covered market. The squares around the market and the church of Sant'Ambrogio fill up with an evening crowd, and the bars along Via dei Macci and Borgo La Croce are where Florentines go for an aperitivo.

For dinner, Cibrèo's trattoria on Via de' Macci, part of the family of restaurants that Fabio Picchi opened in 1979 and that his son now runs, serves Tuscan home cooking with no pasta: tomato and bread soup, polenta, tripe, chicken liver crostini and stuffed chicken neck. It has a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Book, and check the current hours on its website.

The Piazza del Campo slopes down like a shell, divided into nine segments for the nine merchants who governed Siena in its golden age, towards the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall. Sit on the brick paving like everyone else. The tower beside it, the Torre del Mangia, is 102 meters tall, and 400 steps take you to the top for a view over the city's rooftops and the hills.

Inside the town hall, the Museo Civico has one of the most famous paintings of the Middle Ages: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes of Good and Bad Government, painted in the 1330s for the room where the council met, showing in detail what a well-run city and countryside look like, and a badly run one.

Siena Cathedral is a striped black-and-white marble extravaganza, and the Sienese wanted it even bigger: in 1339 they began an extension that would have made the existing church just its transept. The Black Death of 1348 killed more than half the city and ended the plan, and the unfinished wall of the new nave still stands next to the church.

Inside, look down. The floor is covered in 56 marble scenes made over two centuries, and for most of the year they're protected under boards. Look up at the Piccolomini Library, painted by Pinturicchio in colors that look new, and the pulpit by Nicola Pisano. The pass also includes the museum, where you can climb onto the unfinished facade for a view over the city.

Siena's pasta is pici, thick, hand-rolled spaghetti, served all'aglione with a garlicky tomato sauce or with cacio e pepe, cheese and pepper. Have it in a trattoria in one of the lanes off the Campo, away from the square itself, with a glass of red from the Chianti hills just north of town.

Siena's sweets are older than most: panforte, a dense, spiced cake of honey, nuts and candied fruit that dates back to the Middle Ages, and ricciarelli, soft almond biscuits. Buy them from a bakery to take home.

Siena is divided into 17 contrade, neighborhoods with their own church, museum, fountain, flag and animal emblem, from the Goose to the Snail, the Porcupine and the Caterpillar. People are baptized into their contrada, marry within it and mourn with it, and twice a year, on 2 July and 16 August, ten of them race horses bareback around the Campo in the Palio, a ninety-second race that the whole city prepares for all year.

Walk through the lanes south of the Campo and you'll see the emblems on street corners and the little fountains of each contrada. Back in Florence, have a light dinner. After the drive and the steps, you'll want it.

Start at the Mercato Centrale, the great iron and glass food hall built in 1874 by Giuseppe Mengoni, the same architect as Milan's Galleria. Downstairs is a real market for Florentines: butchers, cheese stalls, bakers, tripe sellers and vegetable stands. Upstairs is a modern food court, open until midnight.

Da Nerbone, a stall on the ground floor since 1872, is where market workers have their mid-morning bollito, boiled beef in a bun dipped in broth, or a plate of lampredotto. Have a coffee and a bombolone, a sugared doughnut filled with custard, and look around the San Lorenzo street market outside, though most of what it sells is aimed at tourists.

Behind San Lorenzo, the Medici built their family mausoleum, and it's two very different places. The Chapel of the Princes is a huge octagon covered in colored marble and semi-precious stones, so expensive that it took centuries to finish. The New Sacristy is Michelangelo's: a calm, gray and white room he designed and filled with tombs for two Medici dukes, guarded by four reclining figures of Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk. Lorenzo the Magnificent, the greatest of the family, lies in a simple tomb by the door.

Under the sacristy is a small room where, the story goes, Michelangelo hid for weeks in 1530 when the Medici returned to power, and covered the walls with charcoal drawings. It can now be visited in groups of four, for 15 minutes, by reservation.

San Lorenzo was the Medici's parish church, rebuilt by Brunelleschi from the 1420s with money from Giovanni de' Medici, the founder of the family's fortune. Its unfinished facade of rough stone was meant to be covered in marble to a design by Michelangelo, which was never built. Inside, it's a perfect example of Brunelleschi's clean, gray and white style, with two bronze pulpits by Donatello, who is buried here.

Through the cloister is the Laurentian Library, built by Michelangelo for the Medici's books. Its staircase, flowing down into the entrance hall like lava, is one of the strangest and most influential pieces of architecture of the Renaissance.

Next to the market, Trattoria Mario has been feeding market workers, students and office staff since 1953, at shared tables, from a short menu written on paper each day. It's open only for lunch, Monday to Saturday, and takes no bookings, so arrive just before noon or expect to queue.

Order ribollita, the thick Tuscan soup of bread, beans and black cabbage, "reboiled" from the day before, or pappa al pomodoro, tomato and bread soup, then whatever meat is on. Florentine bread has no salt in it, which tastes odd at first and makes sense with salty Tuscan ham and sauces.

Around the corner on Via Cavour is the palace that Cosimo the Elder, the first Medici to run Florence, built from 1444. He rejected a grander design by Brunelleschi as too showy, and chose Michelozzo's stern, fortress-like palace, which became the model for every Florentine palace that followed. Lorenzo the Magnificent grew up here, and young Michelangelo lived here as a member of the household.

Upstairs is the tiny chapel that Benozzo Gozzoli painted in 1459 with the procession of the Magi, which is really a procession of the Medici and their guests in their finest clothes, riding through a fairy-tale Tuscan landscape. A young Lorenzo is in it, on horseback.

Michelangelo was 26 when the cathedral gave him a huge block of marble that another sculptor had abandoned decades earlier, and he spent three years, from 1501 to 1504, carving the David out of it. More than five meters tall, he was meant for the cathedral roof, but the city put him in front of Palazzo Vecchio instead, as a symbol of the Republic standing up to its enemies. He was moved indoors to the Accademia in 1873.

You know what he looks like, and he's still a shock. Walk around him slowly. On the way to him, don't hurry past the four unfinished Prisoners, figures that seem to be struggling to get out of the stone, which tell you more about how Michelangelo worked than the finished statue does.

Walk west to Santa Maria Novella, the great Dominican church whose green and white marble facade was finished by Leon Battista Alberti in the 1470s. Inside is one of the most important paintings in the history of art: Masaccio's Trinity, painted around 1427, the first picture to use true mathematical perspective, so that the painted chapel seems to open right into the wall.

Behind the altar, Domenico Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel show 15th-century Florentines in their best clothes, playing parts in Bible stories. Giotto's painted Crucifix hangs in the middle of the nave, and the cloister leads to the Spanish Chapel, covered in frescoes celebrating the Dominicans.

The story goes that around 1919-20, Count Camillo Negroni asked the barman at Caffè Casoni, on the elegant Via de' Tornabuoni, to make his usual Americano stronger, with gin instead of soda water. The result, gin, Campari and red vermouth in equal parts, became the Negroni. The details are disputed, but a letter from 1920 shows the drink already existed. The café later became Caffè Giacosa, which closed in 2017 and has since reopened on the other side of Via della Spada.

Have one there, then walk past the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, the old pharmacy of the Dominican monks, open to the public since 1612 and free to look around, all frescoes and wooden cabinets of perfumes and potions.

The banker Luca Pitti built this huge palace in the 1450s to outshine the Medici, and a century later, in 1549, the Medici bought it. Cosimo I's wife, Eleonora of Toledo, wanted a home with a garden, and Palazzo Pitti became the residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany and later of the kings of Italy, when Florence was the capital.

The Palatine Gallery on the first floor is hung the way the grand dukes liked it, paintings stacked frame to frame up to the ceiling, with a wonderful collection of Raphaels and Titians. Beyond it are the royal apartments and, on the floor above, the Gallery of Modern Art. On the way from the Ponte Vecchio, look into the little church of Santa Felicita for Pontormo's Deposition, a swirl of pinks and blues that's free to see.

Behind the palace, the Boboli Gardens climb the hill: the model for the grand Italian gardens copied all over Europe, with an amphitheater, avenues of cypresses, fountains, statues and the Grotta del Buontalenti, a fantastical cave of fake stalactites and sculpted animals. Walk up to the top of the garden for views over the city and the olive groves of the hills.

It's a big, hilly park, and on a hot day one of the few places in Florence with shade.

Walk west through the Oltrarno along Via Maggio and Borgo San Jacopo, peering into the workshops of furniture restorers, gilders, bookbinders and leather workers, to San Frediano, the old working-class district by the city wall. The Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini set his novels here, and it still has the feel of a village.

Have lunch at Trattoria Sabatino, just outside the city gate, a cheap, old-fashioned family place open on weekdays, or a lampredotto from 'l Trippaio di San Frediano in Piazza de' Nerli (Monday to Friday). Then get a bombolone at Pasticceria Buonamici on Via dell'Orto, open since 1949.

In the church of Santa Maria del Carmine is a small chapel where, in the 1420s, a painter in his twenties called Masaccio changed art. His frescoes of the life of St Peter, painted alongside the older Masolino and finished decades later by Filippino Lippi, have real weight, light and shadow, and his Expulsion from the Garden of Eden shows Adam and Eve howling with a grief no painter had shown before. Masaccio died in Rome at 26, and Filippino Lippi completed the cycle in the 1480s. Young artists came here to copy the frescoes, Michelangelo among them, and it was in this chapel that a fellow student, Pietro Torrigiano, broke his nose in a fight.

The chapel is small and the visits are timed, which means you get to see the frescoes in peace.

Piazza Santo Spirito is the living room of the Oltrarno: a morning market, children playing in the day and, in the evening, young Florentines gathered around the fountain with a drink. The church behind its plain facade is Brunelleschi's last, one of the purest buildings of the Renaissance, and in its sacristy hangs a wooden crucifix that Michelangelo carved at about 18. He's said to have studied anatomy on the bodies from the convent's hospital to make it.

For an aperitivo, Il Santino on Via di Santo Spirito is a tiny wine bar that pours good Tuscan wines by the glass, and Archea, on Via de' Serragli, is one of the city's best craft beer pubs.

For the last night, stay in the Oltrarno. Piazza della Passera, a tiny square a few minutes from Santo Spirito, has the Osteria Tripperia Il Magazzino, where Florentines go for tripe done every possible way: trippa alla fiorentina, stewed in tomato and topped with parmesan, lampredotto ravioli and fried tripe, along with the Tuscan classics for anyone less adventurous. Across the square is the Gelateria della Passera for dessert.

If you want one last bistecca instead, Il Latini, across the river near Palazzo Rucellai, is a noisy, much-loved institution where hams hang from the ceiling and strangers share long tables. It's popular with visitors, so book. It's closed on Mondays and open only for dinner on weekdays.