We’d already walked Florence once in the dark and the rain, the night before. The city hadn’t quite shown us its face — just wet cobbles, the noise of the carnival crowds heading for the train to Viareggio, the Arno reflecting nothing. It felt like a tease. So the next morning we went back out, this time with the whole day in front of us, to see what Florence actually looked like.
It takes a while to figure out. The city doesn’t reveal itself from a single angle. You have to earn it — and the earning starts early.
Early morning back streets, approaching the river
Across the river first
We crossed to the Oltrarno side before the crowds arrived on the bridges — down past the Pitti Palace, which is enormous in the way that only palaces built to intimidate other palaces are enormous, and up into the Boboli Gardens. Free to walk past. Interesting to look at, even from outside.
Ponte Vecchio from above, early light
Ponte Vecchio from the riverbank, Arno running high and brown after rain
The Arno was swollen. We noticed it from the moment we came down to the water — the colour of milky tea, moving fast, the stones at the base of the bridges darker than they should be. February in Florence after rain: the river means business.
Pitti Palace, south side of the river
Up through Boboli
The gardens open out above the city in terraces. We weren’t paying to go in — this trip was all free, all street-level, all found rather than ticketed — but the lower paths and walls are available to anyone who just keeps walking. Which we did.
Grotto arch entrance, Boboli Gardens lower terracing
Second grotto arch, Boboli terrace wall with vegetation
The five moss-covered arches of the garden retaining wall from the street, overcast sky
There is something about Italian garden architecture that feels genuinely ancient in a way that English gardens don’t — the stone here is dark and heavy and moss-covered, and the arches look like they grew rather than were built. We kept stopping to look back at them.
The view from the top
Piazzale Michelangelo sits above the whole city. We came up from the south, through residential streets that most people don’t use because they’re not on the tourist map, and arrived at the piazzale from the back. Which means we got the view before the crowds.
Piazzale Michelangelo panorama: the whole city spread below, dome, bridges, hills
It’s one of those views that stops a conversation mid-sentence. The dome is larger than it has any right to be from up here. The river bends through it all. Every roofline is the colour of terracotta. You stand there for a while, and you understand why people come to Florence.
Red rose sculpture in the Rose Garden with city skyline behind
Iron suitcase sculpture framing the city below
Torre di San Niccolò with dome visible behind
The descent: Torre di San Niccolò
Coming down the hill, we passed through the Torre di San Niccolò — one of the old city gate towers, still standing in the middle of the road at the bottom of the slope, with the city visible straight through its arch.
Torre di San Niccolò from directly below, looking up through the arch, crenellated top
It’s not a major sight. It’s not on the itinerary. It’s just there, at the end of a residential street, and you walk through it the same way Florentines have walked through it since the fourteenth century. That’s the thing about this city — the extraordinary is so embedded in the ordinary that you stop registering where one ends and the other begins.
Demidoff monument, Piazza Demidoff: marble group against yellow wall and bare winter trees
The park
Before we crossed back to the centre, we followed the Arno westward and ended up in the Cascine Park — Florence’s long, thin public park running along the river. In February it was quiet and a little grey, which suited it perfectly.
Cascine Park lake with central fountain, bare trees, grey sky
Radio Bruno ferris wheel at the winter fair beside the lake
A winter fair had set up beside the lake — a full-size ferris wheel, white and slightly improbable, sitting next to the ducks. We didn’t go on it. We stood there for a moment and watched it turn, which felt like the right decision. Then kept walking.
Back into the centre: the market
The Mercato Centrale is the best argument for not eating lunch anywhere else in Florence. The exterior alone is worth stopping for.
Mercato Centrale exterior: pink and red Victorian ironwork, green shutters, delivery lorries outside
Inside it is warm and loud and full of the smell of food being cooked properly. We stopped here twice over our days in Florence — once for a traditional Tuscan meal, once for an American-style BBQ sharer platter which had absolutely no business being that good in a nineteenth-century iron market hall in central Italy. The glass ceiling catches the light and makes the whole place feel like the inside of a very well-fed greenhouse.
Mercato Centrale interior: glass and iron roof structure, food stalls, diners at long tables
The Palazzo Vecchio courtyard
We found the Palazzo Vecchio courtyard by accident. You walk in through a gate that doesn’t announce itself, and suddenly you’re in a fifteenth-century colonnaded space with a putto fountain at the centre and painted vaults running around all four sides.
Palazzo Vecchio courtyard: central fountain, painted arched colonnades, open sky above
Vaulted ceiling frescoes of the courtyard arcade: grotesque decoration, birds, heraldic details
Second vault ceiling, looking up: eagle roundel at centre, elaborate painted borders
We didn’t pay to go in. This courtyard — one of the most beautiful spaces in Florence — is free to anyone who just turns in off the street. Nobody told us that. We found it by being in the right place, not by following a map. This is exactly why we do it like this.
Palazzo Vecchio tower glimpsed between rooflines from a back street
The piazza
The Piazza della Signoria is where Florence performs itself. The Palazzo Vecchio tower dominating everything. The Loggia dei Lanzi with its open-air sculpture gallery — the Rape of the Sabine Women just standing there in the rain, not behind glass, not ticketed, just there.
Palazzo Vecchio full frontage: tower, clock, heraldic shields, copy of David at entrance, crowded square
Palazzo Vecchio tower, full height, with heraldic band and battlements
Cosimo I de’ Medici equestrian bronze: green patina, yellow palazzo behind
Loggia dei Lanzi: three wide arches, sculpture group, crowd on the steps
Palazzo Vecchio tower framed through the Uffizi corridor, crowd flowing below
Uffizi courtyard interior: calm loggia, arch to the Arno, exhibition banner
Piazza della Signoria looking across to the ochre and cream buildings opposite
There’s a street performer near the Uffizi who dresses as Dante — full mummy-wrapping costume, Gothic backdrop, a white mask, and a sign that says il Dante degli Uffizi. A small child was standing in front of him, completely frozen, not sure whether to be delighted or terrified. That felt about right for Florence in February.
Street performer: full Dante mummy costume outside the Uffizi, child watching
The Duomo
You can’t avoid it, and you shouldn’t try.
Duomo complex: Campanile dominating, dome behind, Baptistery to the left
Duomo façade close up from below: white and green marble, crowd at the base
Giotto’s Campanile from the square: full height, marble banding, sky behind
Baptistery of San Giovanni: octagonal, black and white striped marble, full crowd
The Campanile is taller than it looks in photographs. It has no right to be that tall, that thin, and that decorated at the same time. The Baptistery opposite it is the same green and white marble, eight-sided, ancient, and completely indifferent to the crowds orbiting it.
Baroque church and piazza scene, active square
Pop-art horse sculpture on rainy cobbles — wait, this is the colourful Marco Lodola piece
One more thing about the north side
We walked up through the market district before heading back — past the Fortezza da Basso, which crouches at the edge of the historic centre like something that hasn’t decided whether to be a castle or a bunker.
Fortezza da Basso: diamond-point rusticated masonry, rounded bastion, hedge foreground
Sarah on the cobbles near the Fortezza, cypress tree behind her, looking back at camera
Mercato Centrale exterior: pink ironwork and green shutters from a different angle
We covered 8.36 miles. We didn’t pay to go inside anything. We found a courtyard most people walk past, ate twice in a Victorian iron market hall, watched a ferris wheel turn beside a duck pond, and came down from a hilltop that stopped a conversation mid-sentence.
The night walk the evening before — through the rain and the carnival crowds — is [HERE] Florence Night Walk . The run through the parks, the morning after this, is [HERE] Florence Park Run.
Florence doesn’t let you off lightly. It gives you too much, and then it gives you a bit more, and then you get on the train to Siena and you wonder if you saw it properly.
You didn’t. Nobody does. That’s the point.
Florence, Tuscany — 8.36 miles combined — ~3hrs 16m — 318ft — 18,014 Steps
