Fiesole

Line 7 no longer starts at Piazza San Marco. From Sunday 26 January 2025 its Florence terminus is the Libertà Porta San Gallo stop on Piazza della Libertà, and the Comune di Fiesole's announcement says the move was made so the line meets the T2 tram, which carries you on to Piazza San Marco or the station. Piazza della Libertà is about 500 metres up Via Cavour from Piazza San Marco — five or six minutes on foot, or one tram stop.

The line is classified urbano, an urban line, so the ordinary Florence ticket covers it: €2 (about $2.35) for ninety minutes, €3 if you buy it from the driver, €18.20 for a carnet of ten, on the Autolinee Toscane fares in force from 1 August 2026. Ninety minutes is enough for the ride up and the walk to the ticket office, not for the round trip.

The numbers below come from the line 7 summer timetable published by Autolinee Toscane, valid from 27 July 2026 and downloaded on 29 August 2026. Journey times are the difference between the two terminus columns on the same run.

• Get off at the last stop, Fiesole Piazza Mino; the ticket office is behind the cathedral, at the corner of Via Portigiani and Via Giovanni Dupré
• Buy the return ticket before you go up — there is no ticket machine at the terminus, and from the driver it costs a euro more
• Saturday and Sunday timetables are thinner than the weekday one; the last runs are the same

By car, and why we would not

The museums' own directions give the A1 exit Firenze Sud and an approach through San Domenico, and state plainly that there is no museum car park: there are paid on-street spaces near the site and free ones further out in town. Fiesole itself has no ZTL to trip over, but Florence does — Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00 — so a hire car is a problem at the bottom of the hill rather than the top. On a bus that runs every ten minutes for €2, driving buys you nothing.

Fiesole — pronounced fee-EH-zo-leh, [ˈfjɛːzole] in the phonetic alphabet, with the stress on the first syllable and not on the o — is a town and comune in the Metropolitan City of Florence, five kilometres north-east of the city on a height above it. It was founded in the seventh century BC as Vipsul, became one of the earliest urban centres of the Etruscan civilisation and then the Roman Faesulae, and for centuries it was the senior partner: Florence began as a Roman colony on the flat ground below. That relationship reversed permanently when Florence sacked the hill town in 1010 and 1025 and conquered it in 1125.

What survives from the Roman town is the reason for the ticket. The theatre dates from the Imperial era, has nineteen tiers of seating and a diameter of about thirty-four metres, and seated over three thousand people; the baths and a temple stand beside it, with a stretch of Etruscan wall running along the edge of the site. Concerts are still staged in the theatre in summer.

After the Renaissance the hill became the address for villas — the Medici built one here — and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was full of foreign residents, which is why it turns up in English novels; Boccaccio set part of the Decameron on these slopes and E. M. Forster used the hill in A Room with a View. The Badia Fiesolana, down the road at San Domenico, now houses the European University Institute. Those points come from the Wikipedia article and the regional tourist board's page on the town, both read for this page rather than from memory.

The archaeological area, first thing

Cross the road from the bus terminus towards Via Dupré, behind the cathedral of San Romolo, and the ticket office is at the corner with Via Portigiani, at Largo Fernando Farulli 1 — the address on the museums' own site. Inside the fence the theatre sits in a bowl of hillside with the countryside behind it, the baths beyond, the temple to the side, and the Etruscan wall along the boundary. The multimedia guide is included in the price against an ID, which is unusually generous — most Florence museums charge for it.

The Civic Archaeological Museum on the same ticket runs from Etruscan grave goods to the Lombard period. The Museo Bandini, a few steps away on Via Dupré, holds thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Florentine panel painting and Della Robbia terracottas in a building put up by Giuseppe Castellucci in the early 1900s — and it opens only Friday to Sunday, all year, which decides whether the €12 combined ticket is worth buying on your date.

San Francesco and the view, for nothing

From Piazza Mino a paved path climbs the acropolis hill to the church and convent of San Francesco, thirteenth century with a fifteenth-century cloister. It is a short climb and a steep one. The terrace and the public garden on the way up give the view people come for: the Arno basin, the city spread out below, the cathedral dome identifiable from ten kilometres away. It costs nothing and no one takes a ticket.

The cathedral of San Romolo on the square is Romanesque, enlarged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with a bell tower of 1213 remodelled in the nineteenth. Neither church publishes visiting hours on a page we could reach, so treat both as open when they are open and do not build the day around them.

Monte Ceceri, if you have the afternoon

East of the town, Via di Monte Ceceri climbs to the hill where the pietra serena quarries cut the grey stone that faces half of Renaissance Florence, including, it is reported locally, the columns of the National Library. Piazzale Leonardo at the top carries a monument to Leonardo's flight experiments. It is free, unpaved and takes one to two hours out and back — a walk rather than a sight, and the part of Fiesole that most visitors skip.

Our answer: yes on a second visit or on a trip of three days or more, no if you have one or two days in Florence.

The case for it is that nothing in the city gives you what this does — a Roman theatre you can walk into, an Etruscan wall, and a view of the whole basin from above, for €7 plus a €2 bus ticket and about forty minutes of travel in total. It is also the coolest air within reach in July, and the site is quiet at opening even in August.

The case against is arithmetic. A morning up here costs you the Uffizi or the Accademia slot you did not book, and if you have two days that trade is bad. The view alone is not the reason to come, because Piazzale Michelangelo and San Miniato al Monte give you a closer one for a fifteen-minute climb from the Arno. Come for the archaeology; take the view as the bonus.

If you are going, the shape that works is: 09:00 bus, the site until 11:00, San Francesco and the view, lunch on Piazza Mino, then either the walk down through San Domenico or the bus back for an afternoon in the centre — the three-day itinerary has a slot for exactly this.

The old road down, Via Vecchia Fiesolana, leaves Piazza Mino and drops between garden walls to the hamlet of San Domenico about halfway to Florence. It is narrow, steep, paved and shared with cars, and it is reported as an attractive walk by every Florence guide that mentions it — with the sensible qualification that walking up it is a different proposition from walking down.

San Domenico is where Fra Angelico entered the Dominican order before the community that produced the frescoes at the convent of San Marco in Florence. A few hundred metres further stands the Badia Fiesolana, with its small Romanesque facade in white and green marble set into a larger unfinished front, now part of the European University Institute.

From San Domenico you rejoin bus 7 at a stop on the main road — the line passes through, so a downhill walk and a bus finish is the easiest half of the trip. Continuing on foot into Florence is possible and long; we have not walked it with a stopwatch, so we are not printing a minutes figure for it.

Piazza Mino is where the eating is: cafés and restaurants around the square and along Via Portigiani, with tables outside in season and a view over the wall on the south side. This is a small town, so lunch service ends when it ends, and on winter afternoons the square goes quiet after three.

Two markets are worth timing a visit around, both reported by Florence guides rather than published in a city calendar we could source: an antiques market on Piazza Mino on the first Sunday of the month, and the Mercato della Terra, a Slow Food producers' market, in Piazza del Mercato on the last Sunday. Check locally before travelling for either.

One practical warning: buy your return ticket in Florence or at a bar in town before you head for the bus, because the terminus has no machine and the driver charges €3 instead of €2.

Staying in Fiesole buys quiet, cooler nights, a view from the room and — the real argument — somewhere to leave a car without meeting Florence's ZTL cameras. It costs you spontaneity: every evening in the city ends with the bus, and while the line runs to 23:45 with night departures at 00:10, 00:35, 01:00 and 01:25, that is a timetable to keep on your phone rather than a taxi rank outside the restaurant.

Our reading is that the hill suits drivers, returning visitors and anyone travelling in July and August, and that first-time visitors on a short trip should sleep in the centre and come up for a morning. What a room on the hill costs is further down this page; the tourist tax by property type and the comparison with the other areas are on the where to stay page. Where this half day fits in a longer trip is set out on the Florence city guide homepage and in the three-day itinerary.