Florence eSIM, SIM Cards and Free Wi-Fi

The zone is the 27 member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, and since 1 January 2026 Ukraine and Moldova. The United Kingdom left it with Brexit, which is why four British networks need four rows above. Inside the zone, what you use in Italy comes out of the bundle you already pay for, at the price you already pay.

What the operator may still do

A fair-use policy is allowed, but only against use that is not periodic travel — living permanently abroad on a cheaper foreign SIM. For an open data bundle the guaranteed allowance is at least twice the plan's price excluding VAT divided by the wholesale cap, which is €1.10 per gigabyte through 2026 and €1.00 in 2027. On a €30 plan that is roughly 54 gigabytes a month, which no city break reaches.

The permanent-roaming check runs cumulatively over at least four months, and either predominantly domestic use or domestic presence proves you are a traveller. The operator must alert you first and cannot surcharge for a period that may not be shorter than two weeks after that alert.

Speed and the spend cut-off

The regulation also forbids worse conditions than at home, quality of service included, where the visited network has the same generation of technology available. Data spend abroad is cut off automatically at €50 a month unless you opt out, with a warning at 80 per cent.

Article 98-undetricies of the electronic communications code — the renumbered successor to the article 55 provision amended in 2005 — requires that every buyer of prepaid mobile traffic is identified before the service is activated, and that the operator records the details on an identity document with its type, number and a copy. We read the consolidated text in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 29 August 2026. The passport comes out and gets scanned.

The codice fiscale works the opposite way round

The law never mentions a codice fiscale. What it demands is an identity document, and for a visitor that is a passport.

Where the tax code appears is in the operators' own eligibility rules, inverted. Vodafone's tourist page states the Dolce Vita offers can only be activated by customers with a foreign tax code; WindTre reserves its Tourist Pass for customers born abroad who do not have a tax code registered in Italy. The visitor tariffs are built for people without an Italian one, and holding one would disqualify you. TIM states no document requirement at all.

What an eSIM saves you

A queue, and the risk of landing after the shops shut. It provisions to your existing handset, so your home number stays reachable for messages while data rides on the travel profile, and you can buy and test it at home while you still have a connection to fix anything.

What it does not do is put you on a better network: a travel eSIM roams on the same Italian masts as everyone else. The identification statute binds Italian operators issuing Italian numbers, and a foreign-issued profile is not one; no primary source states an exemption in those words, so we put it no more strongly.

We publish no eSIM affiliate link here. There is a version of this page whose ranking of "the best eSIM for Italy" is whichever product pays the author most.

The iliad store at Piazza della Stazione, 50123, publishes Monday to Saturday 09:00 to 20:00 and Sunday 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 19:00, noting its hours are indicative. Vodafone lists a store inside the station at Stazione Santa Maria Novella snc but no hours for it.

TIM and WindTre both have shops in the city and neither locator would give up a Florence address: TIM's returns placeholder text, WindTre's redirects to a bot challenge. We could not read either, so we print no address for them.

Florence airport: what we cannot tell you

Both official airport sites were unreachable on 29 August 2026, one timing out and the other refusing the request, so we could not read the shop list, the hours, or whether the terminal publishes wifi. Plenty of pages confidently place a SIM counter in arrivals; we have not confirmed one exists.

Either way the answer is the same: buy the eSIM version online before you fly, or plan the errand for the station. The airport tram takes an ordinary urban ticket and stops at the station door — getting around Florence has that journey.

The one thing worth planning around is the ticket. Timed entries here are named, slotted and scanned from a screen, and the moment you need the QR code is also the moment you are in a queue inside a stone building with forty other phones on the same mast.

Which is why the enormous bundles in the operator table are close to irrelevant for three days: 200 gigabytes is not a feature you will use, it is a number in an advertisement. What matters is that the ticket opens. The ticket layer is compared on the Florence tickets index, and what it costs sits on what Florence costs a day.

The network is called FirenzeWiFi: an open, unencrypted network that, in the city's own words, does not require, process or save authentication information of any kind, nor user access credentials. No SMS code, no email, no social login — so the usual question of whether a foreign phone number will work does not arise.

The allowance is 1 gigabyte per device per day, after which the speed is progressively reduced until the connection drops. It runs 24 hours a day, explicitly on a best-effort basis.

The trick that makes it work

Join the network named FirenzeWiFi, and if the sign-in page does not appear by itself, open a plain http:// address — the city's own instructions tell you not to try Google, because an https address will not trigger the captive portal. Then tap the green "Naviga Libero" button, or wait about a minute.

• It will not reach a museum basement, a stone stairwell or the inside of a cathedral — this is a street-level service
• Open and unencrypted means exactly that: bank on mobile data, not here
• The 1 gigabyte resets daily and counts per device, so a phone and a tablet get one each

What is not published, which is most of it

The city publishes no hotspot count, no list of covered areas and no coverage map anywhere on its site — only "in some of the city areas specifically enabled and covered by the service". Figures of two hundred areas, or of thousands of hotspots, circulate in search results attributed to a page that no longer exists; we could not verify either.

The transport operators publish nothing: GEST's tram page and Autolinee Toscane's FAQ list no onboard wifi, so do not count on the airport tram. The museums surprise people. The Uffizi's own FAQ covers tickets, security, cloakroom, photography and audioguides and says nothing about visitor wifi; the civic museums' pages for Palazzo Vecchio say nothing either. Plan to be offline inside the buildings.

Italian sockets are type F and type L at 230 volts, 50 hertz. A British or American plug needs an adapter, and anything not marked dual voltage needs a converter too — though almost every phone charger made this century handles the full range.

A phone used as map, camera and wallet in summer heat will not last a Florence day on one charge. A handset at 4 per cent while you queue for a dome slot is not hypothetical: the climb takes an hour and there is nowhere to charge on the way up.

What a dead phone actually costs you

A timed ticket is a named reservation for a specific quarter-hour and the staff scan a code. If the phone is dead you are a person with no ticket, in a queue that is already full.

Save every booking as a PDF on the device, because a saved file opens without a connection and without the app that sold it. Screenshot the QR code too, and put a printed copy in a companion's bag. A stolen phone is a different problem, on safety and scams in Florence.