Santa Maria Novella has the misfortune of standing next to the station. People arriving in Florence by train walk past it with a suitcase in hand and file it away as the church on the square where you sit and wait, and people arriving another way often never set foot inside.
Inside there is the fresco that in the fifteenth century taught everyone else how to paint space, a cycle by Ghirlandaio in which the real Florence of 1490 appears, and a cloister painted green where Paolo Uccello worked. The ticket is a single one and covers the museum, the cloisters and the Spanish Chapel as well.
The facade: two centuries in one wall
Look at the facade from the square and try to see where it changes. The lower part, with its pointed arches and recessed tombs, is fourteenth-century. The upper part, with the great pediment, the side volutes and the central doorway, is by Leon Battista Alberti and was built from 1458 for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, whose name runs in capital letters beneath the tympanum.
Alberti faced a problem that was also the theoretical problem of his time: how do you put a classical facade on a Gothic church. The answer is the two great volutes that connect the tall central nave to the two low side aisles. They were copied for the next three centuries across half of Europe, and they were born here out of necessity.
The facing is inlaid white Carrara marble and green Prato marble, the same combination as the Baptistery and San Miniato, which fifteenth-century Florentines took to be a Roman inheritance.
Masaccio’s Trinity
On the left wall of the nave, at the third bay, is a fresco of 1425-1427 that textbooks use as the starting point of the Renaissance in painting.
The Trinity by Masaccio shows a chapel that does not exist: a coffered barrel vault, held up by Ionic columns and an arch, painted on a flat wall. Inside are the crucified Christ, God the Father supporting him, the dove of the Holy Spirit, the Virgin and Saint John, and below, kneeling outside the false architecture, the two donors.
What matters is that the false architecture actually works. Masaccio builds it with the central perspective Brunelleschi had only just worked out, with a single vanishing point set at the eye level of the viewer, that is about a metre seventy from the floor. Stand in the right place and the vault opens in the wall. It is not a decorative effect: it is the practical demonstration that a flat surface can contain measurable space.
Below, a false sarcophagus with a skeleton carries the inscription «I was once what you are, and what I am you also shall be». It is the first memento mori painted with the same geometry as the rest, and it closes the work downwards, at the level of the real floor.
Ghirlandaio’s Tornabuoni Chapel
Behind the high altar, a cycle of frescoes covers three walls from the ground to the vault. This is the Tornabuoni Chapel, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his workshop between 1485 and 1490, with the stories of the Virgin and of Saint John the Baptist.
The reason to look is not so much the sacred narrative as everything around it. Ghirlandaio sets the episodes in interiors and streets of the Florence of his own day, with the furniture, the floors, the staircases and the clothes then in use, and fills the scenes with portraits of real people: the Tornabuoni who paid for the cycle, their relatives, members of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s circle. A Visitation becomes the occasion to display the women of a family in order of importance.
It is the richest visual document we have of what a well-off Florentine house was actually like at the end of the fifteenth century, and it is why it is worth walking all the way to the end of the church instead of stopping halfway.
One curiosity: in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, in those same years, a thirteen-year-old apprentice was working. His name was Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The two crucifixes, and the argument that links them
The basilica holds two crucifixes worth looking for, because together they tell the story of a disagreement.
The Crucifix by Giotto, painted on panel between about 1290 and 1300, hangs in the central nave. It is the work in which the body of Christ stops being a decorative sign and becomes a weight: the legs bend, the torso curves, the flesh gives. The direct term of comparison is the Crucifix by Cimabue, which is at Santa Croce and is twenty years older. I have written about Giotto in the article on Giotto di Bondone.
In the Gondi Chapel, to the left of the high altar, there is instead the wooden Crucifix by Brunelleschi. According to Vasari’s account, Brunelleschi carved it as an answer to Donatello, whose crucifix at Santa Croce had struck him as too earthbound: he is said to have told him he had put a peasant on the cross. It is an anecdote and should be taken as one, but the two pieces of wood really exist and stand a kilometre apart.
The Spanish Chapel
From the Green Cloister you enter an enormous square room, its walls and vault entirely frescoed. It was the chapter house of the convent, and it took its present name in the sixteenth century, when Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, assigned it to the Spanish community in Florence.
The frescoes are by Andrea di Bonaiuto, from the 1360s, and they are one of the most ambitious undertakings of Florentine Gothic: a theological programme occupying every surface, celebrating the Dominican order, with the Church militant and triumphant, the triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas and a view of Florence cathedral as the Dominicans imagined it would look once finished.
The effect, as you walk in, is of standing inside a book open in every direction.
The Green Cloister and Paolo Uccello
The Green Cloister takes its name from the colour of the frescoes in its lunettes, painted in terra verde, that is in greenish monochrome, a technique normally used for underdrawings and here carried through to a finished work.
The Genesis scenes on the east wall are by Paolo Uccello and his workshop, around 1425 and then towards 1447. The Flood and the Stories of Noah are among the strangest things in the Florentine fifteenth century: a perspective pushed until it turns vertiginous, bodies foreshortened unnaturally, and colour almost absent. Paolo Uccello is the artist Vasari accused of having ruined his life over perspective, and here you see what he meant. I have written about him in the article on Paolo Uccello.
The frescoes are in poor condition, damaged by time and by the flood of 1966, and should be looked at in that knowledge.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official website, smn.it. Hours and conditions change: check again before you travel and look at the notices page too.
What the ticket covers. Since 2012 there has been a single entrance to the whole complex, thanks to an agreement between the Fondo Edifici di Culto and the Comune di Firenze. It covers the basilica with its frescoed chapels, the sacristy and the Avelli cemetery, and the museum, that is the Cloister of the Dead, the Green Cloister, the Spanish Chapel, the Ubriachi Chapel and the refectory.
A warning about the price. On 28 August 2026 the fares page of the official site did not publish the figures in a readable form, and I did not want to quote numbers here taken from resellers, who in Florence add a surcharge. You will find the current price on the tickets page of smn.it or directly at the basilica ticket office: the ticket is bought on the spot on the day, without booking, which is the thing that matters most for planning your day.
Opening hours. Monday to Thursday 9.00-17.30. On Fridays and civil holidays 11.00-17.30. On Saturdays and the eves of religious feasts 9.00-17.00. On Sundays and religious feast days 13.00-17.00. Last admission is one hour before closing, and the ticket office stays open throughout.
Please note. The complex is closed to visitors on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, when you can enter only for prayer. The basilica is a working church, so the route may be shortened during services.
Groups. Groups of up to 25 people plus a guide are admitted, and from 6 people upwards headsets are compulsory and must be obtained before entering.
How long you need. The basilica takes forty minutes; for the whole complex, cloisters and Spanish Chapel included, allow an hour and a half.
A tip. If you arrive in Florence by train, this is the first thing you can see: the basilica is three hundred metres from the station, and visiting it while you wait for hotel check-in is the best possible use of your first hour in the city.
What to see nearby
Santa Maria Novella is the north-western end of the historic centre and fits well with the arrival or the departure in the itinerary on what to see in Florence in two days. The Duomo complex is ten minutes on foot.
If Masaccio’s Trinity convinced you, his other Florentine masterpiece is across the Arno, in the Brancacci Chapel at the Carmine. And for the painting of the same decades gathered in one museum there are the ten works to see at the Uffizi, where the panels of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano are also on display.
Photo credits. Facade: Zairon, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Masaccio’s Trinity: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Tornabuoni Chapel: Zairon, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Spanish Chapel: Etienne (Li), CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Green Cloister: MenkinAlRire, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
