Fiesole was a recommendation. Someone our son knows said: you have to go, the views are something else. We were in Florence for three days. The hill above the city had been in the background the whole time — visible from the parks, visible from the bridges — and we hadn’t looked at it as a destination. Then someone told us to.
The problem with Fiesole is that you can’t walk up. The hill is simply too large for that to be a reasonable idea on an afternoon with a timetable. You get the bus — the 7 from the city — and the bus takes you up through hairpins and olive groves and the occasional villa with a pool that you glimpse between trees and think: well, someone’s done alright for themselves. By the time you arrive at the top you’ve already used up some of the surprise. You know it’s high. You know it’s going to be something. You still aren’t quite ready for it.
Florence, from the bus stop at the top of the world. The yellow strip on the horizon was there when we arrived and stayed just long enough.
Olive groves, storm clouds, a burning edge of light above the valley. The view from the Fiesole belvedere at 4:40pm, February 2026.
The views
It had been raining. The rain had done us a favour: by the time we got off the bus, the afternoon crowd had made sensible decisions and gone home. We had the viewpoints more or less to ourselves — just the olive trees, the clouds still moving fast overhead, and Florence spread out below like something from a painting, except it was real and it was right there and the light was doing extraordinary things along the horizon.
The Arno valley in both directions. The dome of the cathedral visible even from up here, small and definite in the middle distance. The hills beyond the city rolling away into grey-blue. And along the line where the mountains met the sky, a narrow band of yellow — the last of the sun getting out from under the cloud cover just before it gave up entirely for the evening.
We stood there for a while. The bus wasn’t going to wait.
The panorama from the olive grove terrace — Florence in the valley, the mountains beyond, cypress trees holding the frame.
The town itself
Fiesole is a real town, not just a viewpoint with a car park. There’s a proper piazza — the Piazza Mino da Fiesole — with a cathedral on one side, a loggia on the other, and a bronze sculpture in the middle that twists two figures upward off a sphere, reaching for something you can’t quite identify. There’s an equestrian statue — two figures on horseback, green with age, the yellow buildings of the square behind them. There are narrow streets going off in directions that clearly lead somewhere interesting, if you had time to follow them.
We didn’t, quite. The bus had opinions about that.
Piazza Mino da Fiesole. The sculpture, the loggia, the cathedral steps. Quiet on a wet Monday afternoon.
The cathedral clock tower. Romansesque stone, pigeons on the battlements, scooters parked underneath as if it’s just another building.
Small things
In one of the side streets, set into the stone wall at first-floor height, a terracotta shrine — the Madonna enthroned, four figures around her, blue and gold and ochre paint still vivid despite the damp. The kind of thing that’s been there so long nobody notices it any more. We noticed it.
Around the corner from the piazza, on a whitewashed wall, a painted panel: a hand-rendered silhouette of the Fiesole tower against a blue sky, framed in an oval, the whole thing maybe sixty centimetres wide. It looked like someone’s art project. It also looked exactly right.
Street shrine, Via delle Mura. Terracotta, still bright. Someone put this here a very long time ago.
Wall painting near the piazza. The tower, the sky, the hill. Someone’s interpretation of the view you came up here to see.
Next time
We got the bus back down as the light finally went. Florence came back up to meet us — the hairpins in reverse, the villas, the olive groves getting dark.
Fiesole is on the list for the next Florence visit. Not for the bus this time. The hill is 295 metres from the city floor to the top — steep, sustained, and almost entirely on road. That is going to be a run worth having. The views from up there, earned rather than bused, will be a different thing entirely.
We’ll come back and find out.
Fiesole, Tuscany – 0.89 miles – 20:46 – 139ft – 1,970 Steps