What to avoid in Florence
Florence has very few scams and quite a lot of ordinary disappointment. The good version of almost everything is two or three streets away from the famous one, and it usually costs less.
Florence is an easy city to enjoy and a slightly tricky one to eat in. Almost nothing here will cheat you outright. What happens instead is quieter: you pay more and wait longer for a weaker version of something the city does extremely well two streets away.
Knowing where the line falls is most of the work.
The three street rule
The expensive, ordinary version of Florence sits directly around the famous sights. Walk three streets away from the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio or Piazza della Signoria, in any direction, and prices drop, the menus get shorter, and the food gets better.
Three streets, in any direction. A restaurant with a view of a monument is paying for that view and passing the cost to you. The same meal three minutes' walk away is often half the price and cooked to order. This applies to food, coffee, wine and souvenirs.
It works because the economics are simple. A place on a main square never needs a customer to come back, because a new one arrives every four minutes. A place on a side street lives on regulars, and regulars notice.
Once you know the rule you stop needing a list. You can walk into almost anything three streets off a piazza and do well.
Restaurants in the main squares
The most expensive habit in Florence is sitting down for lunch on Piazza della Signoria, Piazza del Duomo or the streets immediately around Ponte Vecchio. Forty euro, ninety minutes, and food that was assembled rather than cooked.
What to look for instead is easy to spot from the doorway. A short menu, in Italian first, with a handwritten section that changes. A room where people are eating at Italian hours, which for dinner means after eight. Prices that make sense for what is listed.
One dish deserves its own note. The bistecca alla fiorentina is priced by weight, usually per hundred grams, and a real one weighs around a kilogram and feeds two or three people. Check the per unit price and the raw weight before it goes on the grill, so the number at the end is the one you expected.
The queue for a sandwich
A couple of panini shops in the centre now have lines down the street for most of the day.
The sandwiches are genuinely good. The queue is the problem, not the food. Within three streets of each of them there are places doing the same thing, at the same quality, with nobody waiting. If you have two days in Florence, forty minutes is a real slice of the trip.
A queue in a city this dense tells you something about how well a place is known, not about how well it cooks.
Gelato that is not really gelato
Real gelato is churned to be eaten within a day. It sits flat in covered metal tins and it slumps, because there is nothing in it holding the shape.
Four checks take about three seconds at the door. The tins are flat and covered rather than open. The banana is grey, not yellow. The pistachio is dull khaki, not mint green. Nothing is bright blue.
Anything mounded into glossy peaks has been stabilised to hold that shape in a warm room, which is the opposite of what gelato is for. The full method, with six places in Florence that pass it, is in how to tell real gelato from the tourist stuff.
Quick answers
Is Florence full of tourist traps?
The centre has a lot of overpriced mediocrity and very little actual fraud. It clusters tightly around the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria, and thins out within a few streets.
How do I find a good restaurant in Florence?
Look for a short menu written in Italian first, with a handwritten section that changes. Walk three streets away from any major sight before you sit down. Eat dinner after eight, when Italians do.
Is the coperto a scam?
No. It is a legal per person cover charge, normally one to three euro, and it has to be printed on the menu. Service is often included as well. Tipping on top is not expected in Italy.
Are the famous sandwich queues worth it?
The sandwiches are good. So are several places within three streets that have no queue. On a two day trip, forty minutes in a line is a real cost.
How do I tell real gelato from the tourist kind?
Real gelato sits flat in covered metal tins and slumps. The banana is grey, the pistachio is dull khaki, and nothing is bright blue. Anything piled into glossy peaks has been stabilised to hold that shape in a warm room.
Which parts of Florence should I avoid?
None of the centre is unsafe in any ordinary sense. The streets right around Santa Maria Novella station are scruffy late at night, and the Cascine park is not a place to walk after dark. Otherwise the usual care about pickpockets in crowds is enough.