Behind the basilica of San Lorenzo, on a square that visitors usually cross at speed on their way to the market, stands the Medici family mausoleum. You enter through a discreet side door, and in half an hour you pass from a dark crypt to a room faced with semiprecious stone, then to the dome, and finally to a sacristy that Michelangelo designed and carved in its entirety.
It is a small, dense museum, and it has something the other Florentine museums do not: here architecture and sculpture are the same thing, made by the same hand. The New Sacristy is not a room that houses statues. It is a single work.
What the Medici Chapels are
They are two funerary chapels of the Medici family attached to the basilica of San Lorenzo, declared a national monument and turned into a state museum in 1869, when a newly united Italy was looking for its own symbols.
The route climbs, in every sense. It begins in the Medici crypt, where the grand dukes and their families are buried, from Cosimo I to Gian Gastone, with whom the dynasty died out in 1737. It rises to the Chapel of the Princes, the baroque mausoleum. It ends in Michelangelo’s New Sacristy, which is why most people buy the ticket.
There is also a Lorraine crypt, holding the burials of the Habsburg-Lorraine, the dynasty that succeeded the Medici on the Tuscan throne.
The Chapel of the Princes: a building site three centuries long
The first monumental room is octagonal, tall, and covered by the second largest dome in Florence, after Brunelleschi’s.
What strikes you is the surface. Walls, floor and sarcophagi are faced with marble and semiprecious stone: jaspers, granites, porphyries, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, cut and fitted like wood inlay but in stone. The work was carried out by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the grand-ducal workshop founded precisely to serve this site, and which still exists today as a restoration institute.
Work began in the seventeenth century and never really finished: the dome was only frescoed between 1828 and 1837, by Pietro Benvenuti, and completion came under the Habsburg-Lorraine, that is under the dynasty that had replaced the patrons. Six grand dukes are buried here, in sarcophagi that nobody ever filled with the statues that were planned.
The overall effect is heavy and magnificent at once, and it divides visitors. It is worth entering knowing that it is not a church: it is a statement of power, built by a family that wanted to be remembered as a reigning dynasty.
Michelangelo’s New Sacristy
A corridor leads into a completely different room: white, grey, geometric, silent.
The New Sacristy was commissioned from Michelangelo by two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, and he worked on it from 1519 to 1534. It was to hold the tombs of four members of the family: Lorenzo the Magnificent, his brother Giuliano, and the two young dukes Lorenzo of Urbino and Giuliano of Nemours, with whose deaths in 1519 the legitimate line of that branch came to an end.
The name states the project: it is the sixteenth-century answer to the Old Sacristy that Brunelleschi had built in the same basilica a century earlier. Michelangelo takes over its square plan and its contrast between grey pietra serena and white plaster, and then does something Brunelleschi had not done: he breaks the architecture from inside. The windows narrow towards the top, the cornices overlap, the niches are too narrow for the statues they ought to contain. The space is tense rather than harmonious, and it is meant to be.
The four allegories: Night, Day, Dawn, Dusk
The two tombs that face each other share the same scheme: the duke seated in a niche, and below him, on a sarcophagus with a curved lid, two reclining nude figures sliding downwards.
On the tomb of Giuliano Duke of Nemours are Night and Day. Night is a sleeping woman, with an owl beneath her knee and a mask at her feet. Day is a man turning towards the viewer, and his face is barely roughed out: Michelangelo did not finish it, and that formless face is one of the most modern things in all sixteenth-century sculpture.
On the tomb of Lorenzo Duke of Urbino are Dawn and Dusk, and Lorenzo is shown pensive, his head resting on his hand: the pose that earned him the nickname il Pensieroso.
Neither portrait resembles the dukes. Michelangelo said so plainly: in a thousand years nobody would remember what their faces looked like, so he might as well carve what they were meant to represent. They are ideal portraits, not physiognomies.
On the tomb of the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano there is instead the Madonna and Child between saints Cosmas and Damian, the family’s patrons because they were physicians, and therefore namesakes.
One curiosity that ties this room to another: the sarcophagus of the Duke of Urbino also received his presumed natural son, Alessandro, first Duke of Florence, murdered by his cousin Lorenzino. It is the same Lorenzino who according to Vasari has the face of Michelangelo’s Brutus, displayed at the Bargello National Museum a kilometre from here.
The secret room, and what the museum actually says
Beneath the New Sacristy there is a small space, barely more than a cupboard, whose walls are covered with charcoal drawings. It was found in 1975 under a layer of whitewash, and it has been one of the most argued-over places in Florence ever since.
The version that circulates is that Michelangelo hid there for weeks in 1530, while the Medici, back in power, were hunting him, and that he drew on the walls to pass the time. It is a wonderful story and it may be true.
It is better, though, to use the museum’s own words, which are more cautious than ours: the official entry speaks of «wall drawings attributed to Michelangelo». Attributed, not certain. Some scholars recognise his hand, others think of workshop exercises. The room is extraordinary either way, but it is worth going in knowing that the attribution is open.
How to visit it. Access is by reservation only and places are strictly limited: not to manufacture scarcity, but because the space is tiny and too many people at once alter its microclimate. Entries are at fixed times, a few times a day and not on every day of the week.
Please note: on this visit do not trust any figure read elsewhere, this one included. On 28 August 2026 the official page listed a full ticket of 32 euros in total, that is 20 euros for the room plus 9 for the Chapels museum and 3 for booking, and a reduced ticket of 7 euros for European Union citizens up to the day they turn twenty-five. Treat these as an order of magnitude and not as a fare table: the room is sold on a circuit separate from the museum’s ordinary ticket, conditions change, and more than one entry calendar coexists on the same page. The real price and the real time are the ones you see when you pay, on bargellomusei.it or on the official Ministry of Culture circuit.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official Musei del Bargello website, bargellomusei.it. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Where it is. The entrance is on piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini, behind the basilica of San Lorenzo, five minutes on foot from the Duomo.
Tickets. The ordinary full ticket costs 11 euros and booking is optional and costs 3 euros. There is a 72-hour combined ticket for all the open museums in the group, which also covers the Bargello, Orsanmichele and Palazzo Davanzati, and costs 38 euros. The secret room ticket is separate and is bought on its own.
Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday 8.15-18.50 and closes on Mondays, on 25 December and on 1 January. Last admission is forty minutes before closing.
Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of every month, and on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November.
Evening opening. There is an extra opening on 30 November 2026 from 17.15 to 21.00 for the Festa della Toscana.
How long you need. The route takes fifty unhurried minutes. With the secret room allow an hour and a half, bearing in mind that entry is at a fixed time and has to be fitted around the rest of the day.
A tip. Look at the New Sacristy last and stay in it longer than you planned. It is the only room in Florence where you can watch an architect and a sculptor make the same decisions, and the difference from the Chapel of the Princes, which you walked through ten minutes earlier, is the best lesson the museum has to offer.
What to see nearby
The basilica of San Lorenzo has a separate entrance and holds Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy, the direct term of comparison for Michelangelo’s sacristy. The central market is two steps away.
For the rest of the city, the itinerary on what to see in Florence in two days fits San Lorenzo together with the Duomo complex, five minutes away. Michelangelo’s other Florentine marbles are at the Bargello National Museum and at the Accademia Gallery, and his full story is in the article on Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Photo credits. Exterior of the Medici Chapels: Zairon, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Chapel of the Princes: Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. New Sacristy: George M. Groutas, CC BY 2.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Tomb of Giuliano Duke of Nemours: Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
