Cool things to do in Florence, away from the tourist track

The famous parts of Florence sit inside a square roughly a kilometre and a half across, and that is where nearly everyone stays. Cross the edge of it and the city empties out within a couple of streets.

Nothing below is remote or difficult. Most of it is inside the old walls, and the furthest thing here is twenty five minutes on a bus from Piazza San Marco.

Walk the Viale dei Colli end to end

When Florence was briefly the capital of Italy in the 1860s, Giuseppe Poggi laid out a boulevard along the hills of the south bank. It was built to be walked, and almost nobody walks the whole thing.

Piazzale Michelangelo sits in the middle of this walk. The two ends are the quiet part: shaded, close to empty even in August, garden walls on one side and the city appearing and disappearing on the other.

Bus 12 covers the same route from Porta Romana if you would rather ride up and walk down. Going the other way, from Piazza Ferrucci, means climbing the whole thing, which is fine in April and a bad idea in July.

Go up Erta Canina instead

A narrow paved lane between high garden walls that leaves the city almost at once. Ten minutes up and you are among olive terraces, hearing birds instead of scooters, still technically inside the walls.

Partway up there is a gap in the stonework that frames the dome and the campanile exactly. Locals call it lo scorcio, the glimpse. No railing, no platform, no queue.

From the top you are a few minutes from the Giardino delle Rose and from San Miniato al Monte, which means this connects to the Viale dei Colli walk if you want to make an afternoon of it.

Fiesole, but walk back down

Fiesole is a small hill town twenty five minutes above Florence, with a Roman theatre and Etruscan walls. Take the bus up and walk back down: the descent is the good half.

Look at the theatre, eat something in the square, then walk back down through San Domenico. The old road drops through cypress and villa gardens with Florence spread out below and getting slowly closer. It is one of the best walks in Tuscany and it starts twenty five minutes from the Duomo.

Downhill. Uphill in summer is another kind of afternoon.

A house full of armoured knights

Frederick Stibbert was born in Florence to a British family, inherited a fortune and spent it on roughly fifty thousand objects. Arms and armour, European, Islamic and Japanese, plus costume, tapestries and furniture. When he died in 1906 he left the lot to the city, and it has been kept the way he arranged it rather than rearranged into something modern.

The room people remember is the Sala della Cavalcata: a procession of life sized figures in real armour, mounted, European and Ottoman, drawn up in formation down one long hall. There are samurai suits from the 1600s and a Bronzino self portrait too.

The park outside is free, laid out by the same Poggi who built the Viale dei Colli, and contains a lake, grottoes and a small Egyptian temple. It is usually empty.

A hillside park with a lake

A hillside park with a lake, an island, a neoclassical villa and long meadows that open onto the city. Poggi again, planting lime and horse chestnut across what had been olive groves so that the view keeps appearing between the trees.

The upper slopes give one of the best free views in Florence, and you will often have it to yourself.

Get on the river

The Arno runs through the middle of Florence and hardly anybody is on it. From the water the city looks like a different place, and the crowd on Ponte Vecchio is standing directly above you without a clue.

Rafting means everyone in one boat with a guide who paddles, so nobody needs any skill, and it takes children from about four. Kayaking is one small inflatable each and suits people who would rather do the work themselves. The stretch through the centre is flat with no rapids either way, and you pass directly under the arches of Ponte Vecchio.

Departure times shift with the season.

March to May

10:00 and 15:00

June to August

9:00 and 18:30

September

9:00 and 17:30

October to November

11:00

A cinema inside a Renaissance palazzo

The Odeon opened as a cinema in 1922 inside Palazzo dello Strozzino, under a dome of coloured glass with gilded stucco and three carved Muses. It ran for nearly a century. In November 2023 it reopened as a bookshop and cinema together, after the regular audience objected to a plan that would have dropped the films.

Around twenty five thousand books including English originals, a cafe with a wine window, and the old hall still screening films in their original language. During the day the upper gallery is open with seating and a screen, and nobody rushes you out. The best indoor hour in central Florence when it rains.

Spend one day with no plan at all

The most underrated thing you can do here costs nothing and requires you to put the phone away.

Pick a direction, ideally south across the river or north past Sant’Ambrogio, and walk without a map, without a list and without checking whether the place you just passed has good reviews. Florence is small enough that you cannot properly get lost and dense enough that you will find something every few minutes: a courtyard with a well in it, a workshop with the door open, a church nobody has written about.

The city was built at walking speed and it reads best that way. Everything above is worth doing, and the day people describe afterwards is usually the one with nothing in it.