Florence with Kids

Yes, on the money, and with one honest reservation about the walking. A city built for looking at paintings does not obviously suit a seven-year-old, but Florence has two things going for a family that Rome and Venice do not: it is small enough that every sight on the list is inside a twenty-minute walk, and its major museums charge children nothing at all. A family of four with two children under 18 pays for two Uffizi tickets rather than four, and the same holds at the Accademia, Palazzo Vecchio and the Bargello.

The reservation is physical. Neither of the two climbs has a lift. The Accademia has no cloakroom at all, so the scooter and the big backpack cannot come in. The Brancacci Chapel takes ten people for thirty minutes at a time, and the Chapel of the Magi at Palazzo Medici Riccardi takes ten people for five minutes; both are wonderful and neither is a place to let a toddler run. The streets have narrow pavements, uneven stone and delivery vans until mid-morning.

Our verdict: give it two or three days, and pace it as one indoor thing and one outdoor thing per day rather than two museums. Take the first slot of the morning when children are still cooperative, eat at the market rather than at a restaurant with a queue, and treat the hill at Piazzale Michelangelo as the reward at the end. The adult-paced version of the same city is on the one-day plan; this page is the version that assumes somebody wants a gelato in an hour.

Brunelleschi's Dome is 463 steps and Giotto's Bell Tower is 414, and there is no lift for either. The ticket portal's own rules say minors under 18 cannot climb without an adult, and it states no minimum age at all — so a family with a four-year-old is making its own judgement, not breaking a rule. The climb is not recommended for anyone with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions, vertigo, claustrophobia or in pregnancy. The official time is about 45 minutes for each.

What that means in practice: the Dome staircase is narrow, one-way in places, and there is no turning back once you are in the shaft between the two shells. Children who are fine on a playground climbing frame are usually fine here; children who dislike enclosed spaces are not, and the Bell Tower — wider, with landings to stop on and a terrace at the top — is the better first climb for a nervous seven-year-old. A dome-climb ticket is €53 for an adult, children 0–6 go free, and the dome slot is fixed: five minutes of lateness are tolerated, and names and ID are checked at the door.

The third climb is gentler. The Torre di Arnolfo at Palazzo Vecchio costs €20 with free entry for 0–17, opens 9:00 to 17:00 and closes in the rain, and no minimum age is stated there either. The fourth is not in Florence: the Leaning Tower at Pisa refuses children who will not have turned 8 by the end of the year, and under-18s must be accompanied — the whole rule set is on the tower's age-8 rule and the train. Which pass opens which monument is compared on how the three Duomo passes differ, and the booked dome ticket sits on the card list below.

Under 6

Boboli Gardens is the answer to most under-6 problems in this city: an adult goes in on the €35 Pitti and Boboli ticket, under-18s free, open to 19:10 from June to August, and closed on the first and last Monday of every month. It has grottoes, a long avenue to run down and an amphitheatre that works as a stage. Mercato Centrale costs nothing to walk into, the food hall on the first floor is open every day from 9:00 to 23:00, and a child who will not sit through a restaurant will happily eat standing up there.

The cathedral nave is free, open Monday to Saturday 10:15 to 15:45, and takes about fifteen minutes — long enough to look up at the Last Judgement and leave before anyone melts down. The dress code applies to children too: shoulders and knees covered, no flip-flops. And Piazzale Michelangelo is a square with a view, not a ticket: bus 12 from Santa Maria Novella station takes you up, and the Rampe del Poggi stairs bring you back down through the gardens.

Ages 7 to 14

Museo Galileo is the best museum in Florence for this age group and the least known: €17 for an adult, free under 6 and reduced for ages 6–18, with a family rate covering two adults and up to two under-18s. It is 18 rooms of Medici scientific instruments — armillary spheres, telescopes, early clocks — and it opens on Mondays, when the state museums are shut, though on Tuesdays it closes at 13:00.

Palazzo Vecchio's secret passages tour is the other winner: 75 minutes, run by the palace's own association, capped at four people, through hidden Medici stairs and the attic above the great hall. The card is the secret passage tour at €31, rated 4.7 from 1,269 reviews. Add the Chapel of the Magi at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, where ten people at a time get five minutes in front of a wall of painted horsemen — short enough that nobody gets bored, and free for 0–17.

Two tours are built for exactly this age. The family walking tour with gelato covers Piazza della Signoria to Ponte Vecchio in 2.5 hours with games and scavenger hunts, and the family Uffizi tour hands out scorecards and lets the guide pick the works. Both are sold as private tours, so the listed price covers a group rather than each person — confirm which on the listing before you compare it with a per-person ticket.

Teenagers

One price rule is worth knowing for older children. Palazzo Strozzi has reduced rates for anyone under 30 and for ages 6 to 18, stays open to 23:00 on Thursdays, and runs 'Broken – The Power of the Fragment' from 25 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, which is the sort of contemporary show a fifteen-year-old will engage with more readily than a room of altarpieces. Beyond museums: the pasta cooking class at €16, rated 4.9 from 14,931 reviews, is two to two and a half hours of making three fresh pastas in a medieval tower, and the pasta and tiramisù class is the three-hour version. An e-bike tour up to Piazzale Michelangelo does the hill without the argument.

And the Uffizi itself works better with teenagers than most people expect if you go at 08:15 and give them a list of six paintings to find rather than a tour of everything.

The order matters more than the list. Michelangelo's David first, while everyone is fresh and the gallery is empty; food before the cathedral; the hands-on museum in the afternoon slump; and the hill at the end, when a view is enough and nobody has to concentrate.

Two substitutions keep the day alive. If it is a Monday, the Accademia is closed and so are the Uffizi, the Bargello and the Medici Chapels — start at Palazzo Vecchio at 9:00 instead and put Museo Galileo, which opens on Mondays, in the morning; the full weekday grid is on what opens on a Monday. If it rains, drop the Piazzale and give the afternoon to the Opera del Duomo Museum, which is indoors, large and full of things at child height.

Walking totals for the day come to roughly an hour on foot, spread across six legs of seven to thirteen minutes each. That is the amount of walking a six-year-old will do without complaint if the gaps between are filled with food. The adult version of the same route, with two museums instead of one, is the one-day plan.

This is the section where most family guides invent things, so here is the boundary. No museum in Florence that we fetched publishes a stroller admission policy. Not the Uffizi, not the Accademia, not Pitti. That rule is not stated anywhere we could read, and we will not print a lift or a ramp that may not exist. If a pushchair is central to your day, ask that museum's own visitor desk before you book the slot.

What is published is mostly about bags. The Accademia has no cloakroom: large bags, backpacks and helmets are refused at the entrance, bottles are capped at half a litre, and the nearest storage is the MyAccademia store outside. The Duomo complex sends luggage to a storage point at Piazza del Duomo 38/r before you climb. Orsanmichele states that it has no disabled access and no restrooms, which for a family with a toddler is the same warning twice.

Group-size limits shape the day more than any of that. The Brancacci Chapel admits ten people for a thirty-minute visit; the Chapel of the Magi takes ten people for five minutes; the secret-passages tour at Palazzo Vecchio is capped at four. Those are lovely, contained experiences for a child of seven and a nightmare for a two-year-old who wants to move. Santa Croce, by contrast, hands out free disposable robes at the door for anyone caught out by the dress code, which spares a family the walk back to the hotel for a T-shirt.

Inside the plan above, everything is a walk of seven to twenty minutes, so the transport bill for a family is small. A single bus or tram ticket costs €2 (about $2.30) and lasts 90 minutes on both networks; from the driver it is €3. A child fare is not stated on the 2026 fare sheet at all, so budget a full ticket for each child old enough to occupy a seat and ask at the counter. Pushchairs travel free on the tram, and one bag up to 10 kg is free per passenger; there are no luggage racks.

Regional trains are where the family discount is explicit: children aged 4 to under 12 pay 50% of the adult fare on regional trains in Tuscany, which halves the cost of a Pisa or a Lucca day. Fares run by distance band rather than by route, and the bands are in fares and the airport tram.

Two other family-relevant charges. The city tourist tax is not charged for children under 12 at all, and runs €3.50 to €8 per adult per night by category for up to seven nights. And the Firenzecard, at €85 for 72 hours, lets family members under 18 who are linked to an adult card enter free — but it excludes the Duomo complex and all public transport, and it still requires bookings at the Uffizi, the Accademia and Palazzo Vecchio. Given that under-18s already enter most of those museums free, the card rarely pays for a family; the arithmetic is on the card's own page.

Stay inside the walking triangle between Santa Maria Novella station, the Duomo and Santa Croce, and the day plan above works without a single ride. Families generally do better in a flat than a hotel room here, which points east towards Santa Croce and Sant'Ambrogio, or over the river to the Oltrarno with Boboli on the doorstep. We name no hotels on this page; the area-by-area comparison, with the tax by category, is on where a family should sleep.

For the day out, the honest ranking with children is Fiesole first, Pisa second, Siena third. Fiesole is twenty minutes on bus 7 from Piazza San Marco, and its museums sell a family ticket at €20 (about $23) for two adults and up to four under-18s, with the Roman theatre and archaeological museum open 9:00 to 19:00 from April to September — a hillside with ruins children can walk through beats a fourth gallery. Pisa works from age 8, because that is the tower's minimum, and the grass around the cathedral is the best picnic in Tuscany.

Siena is the one to think twice about. It is a beautiful town and a long day, and the twelve-hour coach trip that packs Pisa, Siena and San Gimignano into one departure is genuinely too long for under-sixes — that is the Tuscany coach day at €49, and we would not put a five-year-old on it. Compare the alternatives, including going by train, on day trips.