Florence Airport to the City Center

There is no airport ticket because the airport needs none: the ordinary urban single covers the whole ride, and four channels sell it.

The luggage rules are the tram's one honest weakness. One bag up to 10 kg and 55x40x20 cm travels free; a case up to 80x45x25 cm and 20 kg needs a supplementary ticket, you may bring at most two, and anything larger is refused outright. There are no luggage racks on the trams, so at eight in the morning you and your case share floor space with the commute. Pushchairs travel free. A family with four big cases is the one arrival profile for which the taxi rank genuinely wins on the maths — four supplements and two crowded trams against one metered ride.

At the city end, the terminus sits on Piazza San Marco in the San Marco district, a flat walk of roughly ten minutes down Via Ricasoli to the Duomo by this site's own walking arithmetic — the Accademia is two minutes off that line. One honest gap: the operator's line map renders in JavaScript and gave nothing readable on 29 August 2026, so we cannot print T2's intermediate stops from an official page; if your hotel is near the station rather than the Duomo, the station section below deals with it. Validate as you board — the 90 minutes run from the stamp or the tap — and remember the ticket then covers a connecting bus, including bus 12 up to the viewpoint, inside the same 90 minutes.

You take a taxi from the marked rank outside arrivals or book by phone or app; the meter on a booked cab starts when it sets off to collect you, so it arrives with a figure already showing.

On top of the start the meter runs at €1.00 a kilometre in the urban bands, rising to €1.99 further out, with a waiting rate added in slow traffic — the full progression is on getting around. What the official table does not contain is the thing most often quoted at the rank: a fixed airport fare. A round figure — €28 is the one that circulates — appears in the press and on forums, but it is not on the city's own document, so treat any flat price as the driver's offer rather than a published rate, and ask for the meter; the same advice, with the rest of the taxi etiquette, is in the safety guide's taxi chapter.

With the airport about 5 km from the centre, a metered daytime ride is ordinarily a modest bill: start, distance, bags — no invented number needed, because the meter prints the real one.

The cut-offs to write on your boarding pass: the last tram into town leaves the airport at 23:58 Sunday to Thursday and at 01:15 on Friday and Saturday nights; the first of the morning is 05:00 every day. A flight that lands by 23:15 on a Tuesday still makes the tram comfortably — the stop is two minutes from the door and trams run to the end of service. A midnight Tuesday landing does not, and then the rank is the plan: taxis run all night, the night meter (22:00–06:00) starts at €7.30 (about $8.50) with a €9.20 minimum, and the €1.10-a-bag supplement applies as always. That is the entire premium — night is when the no-official-fixed-fare rule matters most, because a tired arrival at an empty rank is exactly when a flat quote sounds reasonable. Ask for the meter.

Going the other way, the tram's late runs — 00:30 towards the airport Sunday to Thursday, 02:00 Friday and Saturday — exist for night owls, not for catching planes; the airport is not open to departures at those hours in any useful way, and the first wave of morning flights pairs with the 05:00 tram instead. For a 06:30 departure, the 05:00 tram reaches the terminal about 05:20, which is tight but real for a hand-luggage flight; earlier than that, book the taxi the evening before rather than trusting the rank at 04:30. One more night variable: strike days are announced ahead and run to protected morning and evening windows, and the strikes page explains how to read them before you rely on a last tram that may not run.

A lot of arrivals are really transfers: land at Peretola, get to Firenze Santa Maria Novella, take a train onwards. The honest version of this route starts with a negative finding: GEST's line page renders its content in JavaScript and gave up nothing readable on 29 August 2026, so we cannot cite T2's intermediate stops from an official page — only its termini. What the operator does publish is that T2 runs from the airport to San Marco – Università, and San Marco to the station is about a 15-minute flat walk by this site's arithmetic. In practice the tram passes the station side of the centre and locals hop off there; ask the driver, or anyone on board, for the stop for 'la stazione' rather than riding to the terminus — we would rather tell you to ask than print a stop name we could not verify.

With real luggage, the taxi solves it without the walk: a short metered urban ride, weekday start €3.60, bags €1.10 each. At the station end, the left-luggage office and the platform logistics are on getting around, and every onward regional fare in Tuscany is priced by distance band rather than by route — the band table is on the same page. If the onward train is the whole point of the day — Pisa, Lucca, Siena — the respective day-trip pages each carry the sourced way there. And if you are heading straight to a hotel instead, where to stay marks which areas sit within a flat walk of the station, which on arrival day is worth more than a pretty view.

Leg one is easy and fixed; leg two is where the honesty matters, because Trenitalia sells regional journeys by distance band, not by route, and no official page states the Pisa–Florence band — so we print the rule and the band table's shape rather than invent a single fare.

Choosing between them: the train pair is the default — frequent, cheap and immune to motorway traffic, with the PisaMover's 30-day ticket validity meaning you can buy the return leg on day one. The coach wins when its stop list matches your bed: FlixBus serves Villa Costanza and Guidoni as well as the station, and Guidoni is a stop on the T2 tram line, so a coach-plus-tram arrival can land you at San Marco without touching the station at all. Book the coach ahead rather than at the kerb — the fares are dynamic and the advertised floor is a floor.

Two add-ons worth knowing. If your Pisa landing comes with hours to spare, the Leaning Tower is a 10-minute PisaMover-plus-walk detour from Pisa Centrale, and the timed tower-and-cathedral entry at €24 (about $28) turns a layover into the photograph; the full logic of Pisa as a trip is on the Pisa day-trip page. And children aged 4 to under 12 pay half fare on the regional trains, which quietly makes the train pair the family option too.