The Florence Duomo is the one monument in the city where you can buy the wrong ticket and only find out at the turnstile.
The reason is that you are not buying entry to a church. You are buying access to a complex of five monuments visited on a single pass, and the three passes on sale cost 30, 20 and 15 euros because they include different things. Only one of the three covers the dome climb, which is almost always why you came.
There is also a trap that has nothing to do with price. The cathedral is free to visit, and that confuses people: anyone who joins the queue without a pass goes into the church, looks up, and leaves convinced they have seen the Duomo. They have seen the nave. The dome from inside, the galleries, the bell tower, the Baptistery and the museum are something else.
Let us look at what the complex contains, and choose the pass at the end.
The five monuments of the complex
Whichever pass you choose, it gives access to a fixed list of places, all gathered in Piazza del Duomo and Piazza San Giovanni:
- Brunelleschi’s dome, that is the climb between the two shells up to the lantern;
- Giotto’s bell tower, the campanile beside the cathedral;
- the Baptistery of San Giovanni, the octagonal building in front of the facade;
- the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, behind the apse, where the originals are kept;
- the archaeological area of Santa Reparata, beneath the cathedral floor.
Entry to the cathedral is not included in any pass because it is free for everyone. The queue to get in, however, is long and moves slowly.
Brunelleschi’s dome, and why it is a feat
Filippo Brunelleschi built the dome between 1420 and 1436, and it is still the largest masonry vault in the world. It spans a diameter of 45.50 metres, rests on a drum 54 metres above the ground and reaches 116 metres counting the 22 metres of the lantern on top.
The problem he had to solve was this: to cover an enormous octagonal void, which the city had left open for decades without knowing how to close it, without centring. Centring is the timber framework on which every vault had been built until then, and for a span of forty-five metres it would have taken a forest, as well as scaffolding nobody knew how to hold up.
Brunelleschi answered with two inventions at once. The first is the double shell: two concentric domes, an inner load-bearing one and an outer protective one, each made of eight webs, tied together by twenty-four vertical ribs and ten horizontal rings. The second is the herringbone brickwork, which at every course locks the bricks so that the masonry holds itself as it rises, without sliding inwards.
Between the two shells runs the staircase of 463 steps that leads to the lantern, and it is the same one you climb.
What you see on the way up
The climb is not a service stair: it is a route built to be walked, and it passes through three different spaces.
The first stretch rises inside the masonry of the drum. Then you come out onto the internal galleries, the rings that run round the base of the dome, and from there the church floor is fifty-four metres below you while the fresco of the vault passes an arm’s length away.
That fresco is the Last Judgement painted between 1574 and 1579: Giorgio Vasari began it, drawing the cartoons and painting the upper registers, and on his death Federico Zuccari completed it. There are roughly seven hundred figures over more than 3,600 square metres, the largest frescoed surface in Italy.
From the galleries you also see the eight oculi of the drum at close range, with the stained glass designed by Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello: from the floor they are indistinguishable coloured circles, from up there they are works of art.
The final stretch is the narrowest, because it follows the curve of the two shells as they converge, and it emerges at the base of the lantern.
Giotto’s bell tower
The bell tower is 84.7 metres high, has a square base of about fifteen metres a side and is climbed by a staircase of 414 steps that passes through three superimposed loggias.
Giotto designed it in 1334, when he was appointed master of works of the Opera del Duomo, and he saw only the base built: he died three years later. The site passed to his pupil Andrea Pisano, who completed the third level, and finished under Francesco Talenti in 1359.
Around the base run twenty-six hexagonal panels in low relief, the work of Andrea Pisano and his workshop and completed by Luca della Robbia, showing the creation of the first parents and human activities: farming, weaving, navigation, astronomy. The ones on the building are copies, and the originals are in the museum.
One practical note that matters more than it sounds: from the bell tower you can photograph the dome, from the dome you cannot. If you have time for one climb only and you want the view with the Duomo in it, climb here.
The Baptistery of San Giovanni
The octagonal building in front of the cathedral is one of the oldest in Florence, and for centuries Florentines believed it to be a converted Roman temple. Inside, the vault is entirely covered with gold-ground mosaics.
Please note: the mosaics on the vault are currently undergoing restoration and cannot be seen. This is the fact that can overturn your choice of pass, because the Baptistery is included in all three and for many visitors it was the reason to take the cheapest one.
What remains are the three bronze doors, which are why this building matters in the history of art. The one facing the cathedral is the Gates of Paradise; the other two are by Andrea Pisano and by Ghiberti himself. Those mounted on the building are copies.
The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
This is the part of the complex visitors skip most often, and it is the one that holds the originals of everything else.
Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, made between 1425 and 1452, are displayed here inside a large case filled with inert gas, after the restoration completed in 2012. They have ten square panels with forty-seven episodes from the Old Testament, and it was Michelangelo who named them: he said they were worthy of being the gates of Paradise, and the name stuck.
In the same room, the Sala del Paradiso, the museum has reconstructed at full size the unfinished fourteenth-century facade of the cathedral, the one designed by Arnolfo di Cambio and demolished in the sixteenth century, remounting the original statues in the positions they occupied.
There are then two sculptures worth the ticket on their own. Donatello’s Magdalene, carved in wood, gaunt and covered by her own hair. And Michelangelo’s Bandini Pietà, intended for his own tomb and mutilated by him with a hammer: Christ’s left leg is still missing, and the hooded figure holding up the group is a self-portrait.
Santa Reparata, beneath the floor
Below the cathedral you descend into the archaeological area of Santa Reparata, the church that stood here before and was demolished to make room for Santa Maria del Fiore.
It is not a spectacular undercroft and you pass through it in twenty minutes, but it explains something you cannot grasp from above: the new cathedral was built around the old one, which stayed in use throughout the works and was pulled down only at the end. Down here is also the tomb slab of Filippo Brunelleschi, one of very few people buried inside the Duomo he had closed.
Which pass to choose
The three passes share the same museum and the same Baptistery. The difference lies in what they let you climb.
The Brunelleschi Pass costs 30 euros and covers everything, dome included. It is the only one that lets you climb the dome, and if you are in Florence for that there is no alternative.
The Giotto Pass costs 20 euros and covers everything except the dome, so it lets you climb the bell tower. It makes sense if the dome slots have sold out, if you dislike narrow spaces, or if you want the view with the dome in it.
The Ghiberti Pass costs 15 euros and includes no climb at all: museum, Baptistery and Santa Reparata. With the Baptistery mosaics under restoration, it is currently the pass that gives least.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official website of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. Prices and opening times change: check again on duomo.firenze.it, which is the official site, and remember that the genuine ticket office is tickets.duomo.firenze.it.
Tickets. The Brunelleschi Pass costs 30 euros, the Giotto Pass 20 euros and the Ghiberti Pass 15 euros. The reduced rate for children aged 7 to 14 costs 12, 7 and 5 euros respectively. Under-7s go free. Entry to the cathedral is free for everyone and needs no pass.
Booking the dome. The dome climb requires a compulsory time slot, chosen at the moment of purchase, which cannot be changed or cancelled. It must be booked for the first day of validity of the ticket. In high season slots sell out weeks ahead, so it is the first thing to buy for your trip.
Opening times. The dome opens at 8.15, with the last slot at 18.45 on weekdays and 16.30 on Saturdays; on Sundays and public holidays access runs from 12.45 to 16.30. The bell tower opens daily 8.15-18.45. The Baptistery opens 8.30-19.30. The Museo dell’Opera opens 8.30-19.00 and is closed on the first Tuesday of every month.
The bell tower is not booked. With the Brunelleschi Pass the bell tower climb is guaranteed within the three days the ticket is valid, with no time slot. Only the dome has a fixed hour.
What to bear in mind. The dome staircase is narrow, with sections where you go up and down the same way, no lift and no intermediate exits: anyone who suffers from claustrophobia genuinely finds it hard, not just figuratively. There are no luggage lockers at the entrances to the climbs, so travel light.
Getting there. Piazza del Duomo is the geometric centre of the city and you can reach it on foot from anywhere: ten minutes from Santa Maria Novella station, five from Piazza della Signoria. The area is pedestrian.
If you want to secure the climb, you can book the Duomo complex pass and see which dome slots are still free.
What to see nearby
The Duomo is the first stop on the two-day itinerary in Florence, which from here heads down towards Piazza della Signoria and the Ponte Vecchio.
If the rest of the story interests you, the originals you saw in the museum speak to the ten works to see at the Uffizi, ten minutes away on foot. And to understand where the building site came from, the biography of Arnolfo di Cambio tells the cathedral’s original design.
Photo credits. Dome: Zairon, CC BY 4.0. Interior of the dome: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0. Bell tower: Thermos, CC BY-SA 2.5. Gates of Paradise: Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bandini Pietà: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5. All images come from Wikimedia Commons.
