Uffizi Gallery

Built by Giorgio Vasari for Cosimo I from 1560

Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari in 1560 to house the thirteen magistracies of the Florentine state in one U-shaped block between Palazzo Vecchio and the river. Vasari died in 1574; Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi finished the building in 1581. The Doric colonnade you queue under today is the ground floor of that office block, and the top floor, lit by the long windows, became the family's gallery within a few years of completion.

The same decade produced the Vasari Corridor, the raised passage from Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi and over Ponte Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti. It is sold as a separate ticket; the Vasari Corridor page covers it.

The Tribuna, 1584: the octagonal room that started the Grand Tour

Francesco I had Buontalenti build the Tribuna in 1584, an octagonal room with a shell-encrusted dome and a lantern, to show the best of the Medici collection in one space. For two centuries it was the room every traveller on the Grand Tour wrote home about. You look into it from the doorway now, since the floor is closed to protect the inlay, and the Medici Venus still stands in the middle.

Flood, bomb and the Nuovi Uffizi

The Arno flood of 4 November 1966 reached the ground floor and the deposits. On 27 May 1993 a car bomb in Via dei Georgofili, the lane behind the west wing, killed five people and destroyed part of the Niobe room; the restored room reopened in 1998. The Nuovi Uffizi project then doubled the exhibition space floor by floor: fourteen new rooms on the first floor opened, and the works of the Cinquecento moved down from the corridor rooms into them.

If you visited before 2019, the route you remember is wrong.

Second floor first: Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna and the gold-ground rooms

The first rooms off the east corridor set the thirteenth century against the fourteenth: Cimabue's Santa Trinita Maestà, Duccio's Rucellai Madonna and Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna hang in one space, and you can see the ground shift under the figures from one panel to the next. Simone Martini's Annunciation from Siena follows, then Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi with its gilded harness and the Uccello Battle of San Romano. Allow twenty minutes here if you care about the century before Botticelli; most people walk through in five.

The Botticelli rooms: Primavera and The Birth of Venus

The Botticelli rooms are the reason the 08:15 slot exists. The Birth of Venus and the Primavera hang on facing walls in the new permanent installation, with the Adoration of the Magi that contains Botticelli's self-portrait, the Madonna of the Magnificat and the Pallas and the Centaur nearby. The room fills by 09:30 on any day from April to October; on a guided small-group tour the guide books the slot that gets you here first.

Leonardo: Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi

Yes, Leonardo is in the Uffizi. The Annunciation, painted in his early twenties in Verrocchio's workshop, and the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, restored between 2012 and 2017, hang in the Leonardo room with the Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio in which the young Leonardo painted the left-hand angel. Stand to the right of the Annunciation and the odd perspective of the Virgin's arm resolves; the painting was meant to be seen from the side.

The Tribuna and the Medici Venus

You see the Tribuna through its doorway, and the statue in the middle is the reason travellers once crossed Europe to stand there. The Medici Venus is a first-century BC marble copy of a Greek original. It came from the Villa Medici in Rome in 1677, when Pope Innocent XI let it leave because, the story went, it encouraged lewd behaviour.

Napoleon had it shipped to Paris in 1803, and it only came home on 27 December 1815. Around it stand the Wrestlers and the Knife-Grinder, and the walls carry Bronzino's Medici portraits. Look up at the dome: the shells are real, set into the plaster in 1584.

Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch, Titian's Venus of Urbino

Michelangelo's only finished panel painting, the Doni Tondo of about 1507, still sits in the carved frame he designed for it. The Madonna of the Goldfinch by Raphael, restored over ten years and returned in 2008, hangs on the same floor with his portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni. Titian's Venus of Urbino, the painting Manet reworked as Olympia, has its own room on the first floor.

Michelangelo's David is not in the Uffizi at all; the original is at the Accademia, and the Uffizi + Accademia timed pair covers both in one order.

First floor: Caravaggio's Medusa, Bacchus and Sacrifice of Isaac; the Niobe room

The first floor is where the crowd thins out. The Caravaggio rooms hold the Medusa on its wooden shield, the Bacchus with the fruit bowl and the Sacrifice of Isaac, with Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes across the room. The Niobe room, rebuilt after the 1993 bomb, is the largest single room in the building: the Niobe group of Roman statues around the walls, the ceiling restored, the light from the Arno side.

Rembrandt's self-portraits and the Flemish rooms sit beyond it.

The Loggia terrace and the cafeteria view of Palazzo Vecchio

The cafeteria sits on the terrace above the Loggia dei Lanzi on the second floor. A coffee costs more than at street level, but the terrace gives the only public view straight onto the flank of Palazzo Vecchio and its tower, and it is the one place inside the building where you can sit down in daylight. The bookshop is at the entrance and again at the exit on the ground floor.

The variable that decides your routing is not the art, it is the second floor. Both galleries of gold-ground panels, the Botticelli rooms, Leonardo and the Tribuna are up there, and the first floor holds the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A visitor who runs out of attention runs out of it on the first floor, so the short routing simply does not go down.

The Uffizi is open Tuesday to Sunday from 08:15 to 18:30. The ticket office closes at 17:30 and the last exit is 18:30, so arriving at 17:00 gives you an hour. The museum is closed every Monday and on 1 January and 25 December.

The late afternoon is the quiet window. From 16:00, two and a half hours is enough for the second floor and the Caravaggio rooms, and the Botticelli rooms are emptier at 17:00 than at any time before noon. The trade is that you cannot linger.

On the first Sunday of each month entry is free with no reservation; the ticket is issued at the entrance. Expect the longest queue of the month, and if you can only visit that day, be at Door 2 before 08:00. The Vasari Corridor has its own Friday evening opening from 3 July to 20 November 2026, 19:00–23:00, corridor only.

That ticket does not include the gallery; the Vasari Corridor page has the times and the meeting point.

• Emptiest: 08:15 on a Wednesday or Thursday, or a slot after 16:00
• Busiest: Tuesday morning after the Monday closure, and the free first Sunday (our observation)
• Last practical entry with a same-day ticket: 17:30, when the ticket office shuts

The cloakroom is free and sits under the eastern colonnade before the security check. Umbrellas, cumbersome bags and backpacks must be left there; a small shoulder bag goes through. Nothing on the official pages we fetched mentions a dress code for the Uffizi, unlike the cathedral across town, where shoulders and knees must be covered (Duomo page).

Step-free entry is by the ramp on via della Ninna, the lane between the Uffizi and Palazzo Vecchio. Lifts to the second floor run on request; wheelchairs over 230 kg or wider than 120 cm are not admitted.

Groups of six or more must use headphones with a licensed guide, and groups of eleven or more pay a €70 surcharge (about $82) on top of the tickets. Every card on this page with a guide includes the headsets.

• Free cloakroom, eastern colonnade: umbrellas, large bags and backpacks go in
• Ramp via della Ninna; lifts on request; wheelchair limits 230 kg / 120 cm
• Groups of 6+: headphones required; 11+: €70 surcharge
• Cafeteria with terrace, second floor; bookshops at entrance and exit

There is one café inside: the cafeteria on the second floor, at the end of the west corridor, with a terrace over the Loggia dei Lanzi and a view straight up at the Palazzo Vecchio tower. The museum publishes no menu prices, so we print none — what it is worth is the terrace, which is free to walk onto with a gallery ticket and is the only place on the route where you can sit down. Go out to it between the second and first floors rather than at the end, when your legs have already decided.

Outside, the courtyard has nothing but a bookshop. The nearest real lunch is across Piazza della Signoria and north: the tripe carts and the standing counters that where to eat in Florence names, or the upstairs hall at Mercato Centrale, nine minutes on foot and open 09:00 to 23:00 daily. Kitchens in the centre shut between roughly 15:00 and 19:30, which is exactly when a visitor leaving a long Uffizi visit gets hungry.

- The ticket carries your name. The timed Uffizi ticket is named, so bring ID that matches the booking [uffizi.it tickets page]. - The last hours are the emptiest. From 16:00 the Botticelli rooms are quieter than at any time before noon, and two and a half hours still covers the second floor and the Caravaggio rooms [our observation, not an official figure]. - Groups of eleven or more pay a €70 surcharge on top of every ticket, and groups of six or more must wear headphones with a licensed guide — which is why the guided cards on this page all include headsets [uffizi.it visitor rules]. - The free first Sunday needs no reservation at all. The ticket is issued at the entrance, and that is precisely why the queue at Door 2 that morning is the longest of the month [uffizi.it]. - There is no dress code. Staff at the cathedral turn people away for bare shoulders and knees; nothing on the Uffizi's own visitor pages does the same, so what you wear across the square is not a problem here [uffizi.it visitor rules, checked against the Opera del Duomo's]. Because groups of six or more at the Uffizi need headsets and a licensed guide, the guided tours in Florence that include headsets take care of both requirements before you reach the ticket line.

The address is Piazzale degli Uffizi, 50122 Firenze: the long courtyard between Piazza della Signoria and the Arno. The doors are numbered on the west side of the courtyard. Door 1 is for anyone with a reservation or a ticket in hand, Door 2 is the ticket office for same-day sales, and Door 3 serves groups.

The numbering comes from the official how-to-purchase page; the signs on site match it, but check the boards when you arrive because the museum moves the group entrance during works. From Santa Maria Novella station it is a fifteen-minute walk: Via de' Panzani, Via de' Cerretani, past the Duomo, then Via dei Calzaiuoli to Piazza della Signoria. Bus C2 stops close by; an urban bus or tram ticket costs €2 for 90 minutes on the fares in force from 1 August 2026, bought in the app, at a tobacconist or with contactless on board.

There is no parking. The whole centre is a ZTL, closed to unauthorised cars Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00; leave a hire car at one of the ring-road garages.

• Door 1: reservations and tickets in hand
• Door 2: ticket office, same-day sales, first-Sunday free tickets
• Door 3: groups
• Ramp via della Ninna: step-free entry

Book the 08:15 slot, take the second floor first and leave by the Arno exit at 10:30 with the Botticelli rooms behind you before they fill. Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Vecchio and the Bargello are all within five minutes on foot, and the Accademia is a twelve-minute walk for an afternoon David slot. The three-day Florence itinerary starts its first morning exactly this way, and the full attractions list ranks everything else by time needed.

Every other museum on this site with hours, prices and a map is on the museums page. The rest of the city starts from what to see in Florence.