Florence in 3 Days

Three days covers the ten sights most people come for, with one afternoon spare for a nap or a market. It does not cover Florence and Tuscany both at leisure, and that is the honest line. Two days gets you the Duomo, David, the Uffizi and a sunset, at a pace that leaves no time for the Oltrarno; if that is your budget, the two-day version drops the museums of day three and keeps the rest. Three days adds the Pitti Palace and Boboli side of the river and gives you a choice on the last day between more of the city and a coach to Siena or the coast.

Four or five days is where Tuscany fits without stealing from the city: the three days below plus one or two of the day trips, and every day trip compared with the train covers those. With one day in Tuscany inside three days, use day 3B below and accept that Santa Croce and the Bargello wait for the next visit.

Where you sleep changes the walking. Every stop in this plan is inside the ZTL and the longest single walk is about 21 minutes, so a bed between the station and Santa Croce puts you within fifteen minutes of everything; which neighbourhood to sleep in works through the trade-offs. The Florence city guide homepage has the how-many-days planner and the month-by-month crowd table if you are still deciding between two, three and five.

Florence closes in shifts. The state museums shut on Monday, the civic ones on Thursday afternoon or Tuesday, the churches on Sunday morning, and no blog we checked gets all of them right. This table is what the official pages said on 28 August 2026, and the day order below is built around it.

Getting about costs almost nothing. Everything in the plan is on foot, and the two bus rides that save your legs (up to Piazzale Michelangelo, back from San Miniato) use the urban ticket: €2 (about $2.30), valid 90 minutes, €3 (about $3.50) if you buy it from the driver, fares in force since 1 August 2026. The tram T2 from the airport uses the same ticket. A daily pass is not stated on the fare sheet.

If you drive in, do not drive into the centre. The ZTL cameras run Monday to Friday 7:30–20:00 and Saturday 7:30–16:00, and the fine amount is not stated on the city page, which is not a reason to test it. Hotel guests give their plate to reception on arrival and the hotel transmits it to the police; without that step the gate has your number.

The tourist tax is paid at the hotel: €3.50 (about $4) per person per night in a one-star up to €8 (about $9) in a five-star, for a maximum of 7 nights, children under 12 exempt. The city has published the 2025 table; the 2026 one was not online on 28 August 2026.

Siena or Florence is the question people ask, and the day plan answers it: Florence for three days, Siena for one of them if you like. Choose option A if the art was the reason you came; the Bargello and the Brancacci are the two rooms in Florence most visitors never see and the ones art historians would take first. Choose option B if you have three days and this is your only Tuscany, and pick the three towns over the coast unless the sea is the point: Cinque Terre from Florence is four hours on the road out of a thirteen-hour day.

Both options leave the museums of day one and two untouched, so nothing above depends on this choice. If you take the coach, the Uffizi ticket with audioguide on day two becomes the last museum of the trip; consider the €16 afternoon Uffizi ticket on day one after the Baptistery instead, and use the freed morning of day two for Santa Croce.

The Firenzecard costs €85 (about $99) and runs 72 hours from the first museum entry, one entry per museum across 60-plus of them. It excludes the Duomo complex and public transport, and the Vasari Corridor costs €20 extra with it. Add up what it would replace in this plan: Accademia €20, Medici Chapels €11, Uffizi €25, Palazzo Vecchio €18, Pitti and Boboli €22, Santa Croce €10, Bargello €12, Galileo €14, Brancacci €15, which comes to €147 (about $172) plus the booking fees.

On option A the card saves about €60 and lets you skip the Bargello and Santa Croce fees without a second thought. On option B, with only day one and two in the city, the covered entries sum to €96 and the saving shrinks to eleven euro. It never covers the €30 dome pass.

Reservations stay mandatory for the Uffizi, the Accademia and Palazzo Vecchio even with the card, so the booking calls do not go away; the Firenzecard page has the museum list.

In order of how fast they sell out, from the one that cannot be changed to the ones you can walk up to on the day.

• 1. Brunelleschi dome slot. The slot cannot be changed once bought, names are checked at the door, and the sale window ran to 2 January on 28 August 2026. Book the dome slot before anything else; if the portal is out, the dome climb with the 3-day pass has its own allocation and cancels free.
• 2. Accademia. The €4 reservation fee is the price of not standing in a line the gallery itself describes as long. The Accademia timed ticket fixes the 8:15 slot and includes the audio app.
• 3. Uffizi. €29 for the advance timed ticket against €25 on the day; in April, May, September and October the first slots go a fortnight ahead. The Uffizi ticket with audioguide is the reseller version with 24-hour cancellation.
• 4. Brancacci Chapel. 10 people per 30-minute visit and the museum's own 'booking strongly recommended'. Email or phone via the civic museums' page; no reseller sells it.
• 5. Palazzo Vecchio. Online booking through the civic portal, mainly for the tower on a clear day; the museum itself takes walk-ups.
• 6. The Tuscany or Cinque Terre coach, if you take option B. Pisa, Siena and San Gimignano in one day and the Cinque Terre trip both cancel free 24 hours before, so book them early and drop them late if the weather turns.
• 7. Pitti and Boboli, Santa Croce, Bargello. Walk-up is fine most of the year; book only for a fixed time on a holiday weekend.

Rain takes out the dome climb (the passage is open to the sky at the top), the tower of Palazzo Vecchio, which closes in rain by rule, and the sunset. It leaves every museum, and Florence has more of them than three days can hold.

• Vasari Corridor, Friday evening. From 3 July to 20 November 2026 the corridor opens on Friday nights 19:00–23:00 as a corridor-only visit of about 35 minutes, €20 (about $23) same-day and €24 (about $28) in advance, reservation mandatory and nominative. Slot it after dinner on a Friday day two.
• Medici Chapels with Michelangelo's secret room. The combo ticket is €32 (about $37) and booking is mandatory; it replaces the €11 chapels ticket on day one for anyone who wants the charcoal drawings under the sacristy.
• Palazzo Strozzi. 'Broken: The Power of the Fragment' opens 25 September 2026 and runs to 24 January 2027; dated tickets €15, open to 20:00 daily and 23:00 on Thursdays, which makes it the evening museum of the plan.
• Museo Novecento. The permanent collection is away at Castelfiorentino until 20 September 2026, so before that date the €13 ticket buys the Baselitz show only. After it, a rainy-hour stop on Piazza Santa Maria Novella.
• Uffizi after 16:00. The €16 afternoon ticket, in force since 1 January 2026, is the cheap way to add a second Uffizi visit or to move the museum to a wet evening.

Everything in the three days sits inside the ZTL, and inside the ZTL the fastest vehicle is your feet: the Accademia to the Duomo is about 9 minutes, the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace about 9, Santa Croce to the Bargello about 8. Taxis can enter, but a taxi from the Uffizi to the Pitti takes longer than the walk because it has to go round by the bridges.

Two rides are worth the €2 ticket. Bus 12 runs from Santa Maria Novella station up to Piazzale Michelangelo, which turns the 21-minute climb from Boboli into a ride, and it comes back down the same way after sunset. And on arrival, tram T2 from the airport into the centre uses the urban ticket, €2 for 90 minutes, no separate airport fare; buy it at the machine, because on board it is €3. Validate on boarding. Walking minutes on this page come from the map coordinates of each entrance, and every one is written as 'about' because Florence's streets add a minute for every wrong turn.

The walks between stops add up to roughly 2.5 km on day one, 5 km on day two and 4 km on day three, measured between entrance coordinates and rounded up for cobbles and wrong turns. Every figure below is an 'about', and none of them include the steps inside the buildings, which on day one are the ones that count.

Inside the buildings, day one climbs 463 steps up the dome and the same down, plus the 414 of the bell tower if the pass tempts you into it. Day two has the optional Torre di Arnolfo, which closes in rain, and the hill. Day three is flat.

If knees are a concern, move the dome to the afternoon of day one and let the Accademia and San Lorenzo take the morning; the slot is yours to choose when you buy, and only then.

Each ticket portal states its own rules and they are stricter than the blogs suggest. Collected here so that nothing on the route sends you back to the hotel.

• Dress: shoulders and knees covered, no flip-flops, in the Duomo cathedral and Baptistery; shoulders and legs covered at Santa Croce, where free disposable robes are handed out. San Miniato is a working monastery and expects the same.
• Bags: the Accademia has no cloakroom and refuses large bags, backpacks and helmets, with water capped at 0.5 litres. The Duomo complex sends luggage to storage at Piazza Duomo 38/r. Travel light on day one.
• Timed slots: the dome slot cannot be changed, with 5 minutes of tolerance and an ID check. Accademia and Uffizi advance tickets are dated and timed; the Uffizi and Vasari Corridor ticket is also nominative and non-refundable.
• Free Sundays: the state museums (Uffizi, Accademia, Pitti, Bargello, Medici Chapels) are free on the first Sunday of the month with no booking and a queue at the gate. If your day two lands on one, the 8:15 start becomes a 7:30 start in the line, or you swap the days.
• Heat: Palazzo Vecchio limits the tower to the walkway on red-alert days and closes it in rain; Orsanmichele shuts its upper floor at 34°C indoors. July and August afternoons belong in the museums, not on the terraces.
• Children: under 7 free at the Duomo, under 18 free at the state museums, under 12 free at Santa Croce and exempt from the tourist tax; the dome climb needs an adult with every minor.

A fourth day turns the choice on day three into two days: keep option A for the city and add the coach the next morning, or the other way round if the forecast says rain on the coast. The Tuscany coach is the one to move, because both tours here cancel free 24 hours before and a museum ticket does not.

A fourth day in the city itself has an obvious shape too. The Vasari Corridor, if it is a Friday between 3 July and 20 November 2026, at 19:00. Palazzo Medici Riccardi and the Chapel of the Magi, €15 in high season, closed Wednesdays, with a 5-minute limit in the chapel itself. The Laurentian Library next to San Lorenzo, €5, weekday mornings 10:00–13:30 only, for Michelangelo's staircase. Santa Maria Novella by the station, €7.50, for the Spanish Chapel and the Green Cloister. None of those needs a booking, and all four are within ten minutes of the day-one route, which is why they wait for a day that has no dome slot in it. For a fifth day, the day trips comparison starts with the train timetables to Pisa and Lucca.