Perched on one of the highest hills overlooking Florence, the basilica of San Miniato al Monte is one of the finest examples of Tuscan Romanesque architecture in Italy and one of the most beautiful churches in the city. Begun in 1013, it was built on the spot where, according to tradition, the early Christian martyr Saint Miniato was buried after his execution in the third century. The facade is the building most famous feature, a precise composition in white Carrara marble and green serpentine.....

Home of Michelangelo David, the Galleria dell Accademia in Florence is among the most visited art museums in Italy, a relatively small institution whose extraordinary holdings of late medieval and Renaissance Florentine art make it a fixture on every visitor itinerary. The museum opened in 1784 by order of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, to provide a study collection for the students of the adjacent academy of fine arts. Michelangelo five-metre marble of David, carved between 1501 and 1504 and move.....

Several Florence-based tour operators run day trips to the medieval Umbrian hill towns of Assisi and Orvieto, two of the most photographed and historically important small cities of central Italy. The combined excursion makes for a long but rewarding day on the road, taking in two utterly different but equally striking towns that would each merit a longer visit in their own right. The drive south from Florence runs through the rolling Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, with cypresses, vineyards an.....

Built as the parish church of the Medici family and consecrated as one of the oldest churches in Florence, the Basilica of San Lorenzo lies just behind the central market and was rebuilt in its present form in the early fifteenth century to designs by Filippo Brunelleschi. Many of the early Medici, including Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent, are buried in its precincts. Brunelleschi nave, with its grey pietra serena pilasters set against pale plaster walls, is a textbook example of .....

A quietly extraordinary church and former Dominican convent in Florence, the Basilica of San Marco is best known for the cycle of frescoes painted on its cell walls in the 1430s and 1440s by Fra Angelico, who lived as a friar in the building while he worked. The basilica and adjoining museum together offer one of the most distinctive Renaissance experiences in the city. The original church on the site was rebuilt for the Dominicans by Michelozzo in the 1430s with the financial support of Cosimo.....

Tucked behind a deceptively bare facade on the southern bank of the Arno in Florence, the Basilica of Santo Spirito hides one of the most refined interiors of the Italian Renaissance. Designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and largely built after his death, the church was begun in the 1440s and completed in the 1480s, the architect last and arguably most complete work. Brunelleschi plan is a Latin cross with the curious feature of repeating the same simple module along the aisles and around the trans.....

The Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce, standing on a vast piazza on the eastern side of the historic centre of Florence, is often called the Temple of the Italian Glories because of the great Italians buried within its walls. Begun in 1294 to designs traditionally attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, it is the largest Franciscan church in the world. Within the nave and the side chapels lie the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Niccolo Machiavelli, the composer Gioachino Rossini, the poet Ugo.....

Laid out behind the Pitti Palace by the Medici family in the mid sixteenth century, the Boboli Gardens are one of the largest and most influential historic gardens in Italy, climbing the hillside south of the Arno in central Florence. The fifty-hectare grounds remain a model for the formal Italian garden, shaping the great parks of Versailles and many other European royal palaces. The work began in the 1550s under Cosimo I de Medici, who had acquired the palace from the Pitti family and wanted .....

Hidden inside the otherwise unassuming church of Santa Maria del Carmine on the southern side of the Arno in Florence, the Brancacci Chapel holds one of the most important fresco cycles in the entire history of western art. Painted in the 1420s by Masaccio and Masolino and completed half a century later by Filippino Lippi, the chapel is considered the cradle of Italian Renaissance painting. The chapel was commissioned by Felice Brancacci, a wealthy Florentine merchant and diplomat, who engaged .....

A thousand-year-old church on a small square just behind the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Santo Stefano al Ponte has been reborn in the early twenty-first century as the Cathedral of the Image, a venue for large-scale immersive multimedia exhibitions that turns the deconsecrated interior into a single great projection screen for digital art shows. The original church on the site dates to the eleventh century and stood at the edge of the medieval city, near the bridges that crossed the Arno. A ser.....