In piazza della Signoria almost everyone photographs the tower, the copy of the David and the loggia, and then moves on. Palazzo Vecchio, the building that closes one side of the square, is still Florence’s town hall: the mayor works here, and the rooms you walk through as a visitor are two doors away from a council office.
Inside are a hall built to hold an assembly of twelve hundred people, a windowless secret room that is really a piece of furniture, and the story of two battles that Leonardo and Michelangelo were meant to paint there and that neither of them finished.
There is one time to remember, though: on Thursdays Palazzo Vecchio closes at 14:00. On the other six days it stays open until 19:00, which is why anyone arriving on a Thursday afternoon finds the door shut.
Where did a grand duke who preferred alchemy to governing keep his stones and crystals?
Why a hall commissioned by a friar ended up painted with a Medici’s victories
The Hall of the Five Hundred measures roughly twenty-two metres by fifty-six and is vast in a way photographs do not convey. But standing in front of those walls, you wonder something else: why does a hall on this scale exist at all?
No prince wanted it. It was built between 1494 and 1498 by il Cronaca, Baccio d’Agnolo and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder to house the Great Council of Girolamo Savonarola’s republic, which had just reformed the city’s government by widening it. The Council had three thousand six hundred members and met in rotation, twelve hundred at a time: the room had to hold them. Built for that, it was as bare as a monastery refectory.
Then the republic fell and the Medici came back. Between 1563 and 1565 Giorgio Vasari raised the ceiling by about seven metres and covered the walls with six battle scenes recounting Cosimo I’s victories over Pisa and Siena. Look up, then look at the walls: you are reading a political act. The hall of the popular assembly was turned into the hall of triumph of the man who had dissolved that assembly, and the conversion was carried out without demolishing anything, only by adding.
The two most famous murals you will never see
In 1503 the gonfalonier Pier Soderini and the chancery secretary Niccolò Machiavelli had an idea that on paper is one of the most ambitious commissions of the Renaissance: to set Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti against each other in the same hall.
Leonardo was given the Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina. Neither finished.
The reasons differ and say something about the two men. Leonardo tried a technique that did not hold, and his battle spoiled while he was painting it. Michelangelo got as far as the preparatory cartoon and then left for Rome, summoned by Julius II, and never came back to that wall. What survives are copies of copies: Leonardo’s central group is known mainly through a drawing by Rubens, made a century later from a copy.
Whether the Anghiari is still there, hidden behind Vasari’s plaster, has been argued over for decades. The investigations have produced no conclusive answer, and in the meantime anyone telling you the story as settled fact is running ahead of the evidence. Go in knowing that this wall is at once the most celebrated and the emptiest in Florence.
The Studiolo of Francesco I, which is not a room but a cabinet
How do you hide a collection inside architecture? The answer is behind a small door off the great hall, and it has to be looked for, because it is easy to walk straight past.
The Studiolo of Francesco I is a small windowless space under a barrel vault, its walls entirely lined with paintings and bronzes. It is not a gallery. It is a cabinet the size of a room: behind the pictures are the cupboards, and every painted panel is the door of a compartment in which the grand duke kept the things he collected, stones, crystals, objects of art and of nature.
The arrangement is not random. The walls are organised by the four elements, and the paintings almost always show human work: a goldsmith’s workshop, pearl fishing, a foundry. It is the portrait of a man who preferred alchemy to governing and who had a place built where he could be alone with his things.
The vault is the best preserved and the most legible part: at the centre there is a portrait in a medallion, and the allegories run around it. Then look down, towards the closed compartments. The meaning of the room lies entirely in the distance between the two.
The Arnolfo Tower, and why it is booked separately
You can climb the tower, but not on the museum ticket: it is a separate admission and it requires booking. Three things to know before counting on it. It closes before the museum, at 17:00; children under six are not allowed up; and it closes in the rain, because the walkway is open to the sky.
At the top you see what you see from every tower in Florence, which is the dome. The difference is the height of the viewpoint over the square: from up there the Signoria reads like a plan, and one thing that escapes you at ground level becomes obvious, namely that the palace does not stand at the centre of the space but closes it along one side, like a stage flat.
The Roman theatre excavations, and a contradiction to settle by telephone
Beneath the palace lies a Roman theatre, the one belonging to first-century Florentia, and in normal times it is visited with a guide.
Warning: here two pages of the city council’s own site contradict each other. The museum page gives the archaeological route as «temporarily closed to the public»; the hours page instead sells guided visits on Saturdays and Sundays at 12:00 and 12:45, for a maximum of fifteen people, at 5 euros and with compulsory booking. I have no way of knowing which of the two is current.
If the excavations are the reason you want to go in, telephone 055 0541450 before buying the ticket.
Practical information
Details checked on 10 September 2026 on the site of the City of Florence, which owns the building. Prices and opening times change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The full museum ticket costs 18 euros plus 1 euro booking fee and applies to anyone over 25. The reduced ticket costs 12 euros and applies to 18-25 year olds and university students. Under 18s go in free. The Arnolfo Tower has its own ticket, 20 euros full and 13 reduced.
Warning about a price that does not apply to you. The figure of 10 euros circulates online: that is the Card del Fiorentino, it lasts a year and it is reserved for residents of Florence or of the Metropolitan City comuni. If you are reading this to plan a trip, your price is 18.
Opening times. The museum opens 9:00-19:00 from Monday to Wednesday and from Friday to Sunday, and on Thursday 9:00-14:00. The ticket office closes one hour before. The tower opens 9:00-17:00, and on Thursday until 14:00.
Getting there. The palace occupies an entire side of piazza della Signoria, in the pedestrian heart of the city: you can walk there from anywhere in the centre. The museum entrance opens onto Michelozzo’s courtyard, the one with the fountain and the putto.
How long it takes. An hour and a half for the museum and the Studiolo. Two and a half hours adding the tower, booking and waiting included.
The rest of Florence
Palazzo Vecchio, the Uffizi Gallery and the Ponte Vecchio with the Vasari Corridor lie within three hundred metres, and Vasari designed them to be walked in sequence: the corridor starts right here. The full two-day route, with the calendar of closing days that decides the order, is in what to see in Florence in 2 days.
If the great hall has convinced you that in Florence politics is written on the walls, the next two steps are the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s doors, where a competition between two goldsmiths decided who would build the dome, and the basilica of San Lorenzo, which is the Medici family church.
For the sculpture that stood in this square before the copies there is the Bargello Museum, and the original David is in the Accademia Gallery.
Photo credits: façade by Francesco Bini (CC BY-SA 4.0); Hall of the Five Hundred and Studiolo vault by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 4.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
