You want to visit the Uffizi, and the real question is not whether it is worth it. It is how to come out without feeling you have walked two miles of corridors glancing at paintings.
The museum displays around two thousand works along a route that starts in the thirteenth century and ends in the eighteenth. Anyone who goes in without a list stops in front of everything for the first twenty minutes, then speeds up, and the masterpieces they came for slide past in the last half hour, when their legs have given out. The answer is not to walk faster: it is to pick ten works and give each one the time it deserves.
There is also a practical reason to trust an up-to-date list. The Uffizi Galleries have reorganised the displays and renumbered the rooms, so the directions that have circulated for years, the famous “room 10-14” for Botticelli, no longer match what you read on the labels. The rooms below are the current ones, taken from the museum’s own catalogue entries.
So where do you start?
With the fourteenth century, because the Uffizi is one of the few museums in the world where the birth of modern painting unfolds in order, room after room, exactly as it happened.
How the route is laid out
The museum occupies two floors of the building Giorgio Vasari designed in 1560 to house the administrative offices of the Grand Duchy, and that bureaucratic function is where the name comes from. The second floor holds painting from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, in rooms marked with the letter A. The first floor holds sixteenth-century Venetian painting and the seventeenth century, in the D rooms, and ends in the galleries devoted to Caravaggio.
The route is therefore chronological and downhill. The first nine works on this list are on the second floor and the last two on the first, which means you can follow them in the order I tell them without doubling back.
1 – Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna
You begin in room A4, where three great altarpieces hang side by side: the Maestà by Cimabue, the one by Duccio di Buoninsegna and the one by Giotto. The museum put them together deliberately, because the comparison tells in three paintings what textbooks need a chapter to explain.
The Ognissanti Madonna is a tempera on panel with a gold ground, 325 by 204 centimetres, painted around 1300-1305 for the Florentine church of Ognissanti. Look at the throne: in the other two paintings it is a flat symbol, while here it becomes a Gothic tabernacle built in space, with inlaid marble and angels who genuinely stand in front of it and behind it. And look at the Virgin, who has a body under the cloak and a weight that presses down on the seat.
This is why Giotto is considered the beginning of everything, and if you want to understand how he got there I have written about his revolution in the article on Giotto di Bondone.
2 – Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbino
In room A9 two small panels, 47 by 33 centimetres each, painted in oil between 1473 and 1475, face one another. They are Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, shown in profile like figures on an ancient medal.
The profile is not only a stylistic choice. Federico had lost his right eye and part of his nose in a tournament, and his left side was the only presentable one. Piero della Francesca turns the constraint into an idea: the two face each other as if on an imperial coin, motionless, while behind them runs a continuous landscape of hills and water that is the duchy they rule.
Battista died in 1472, aged twenty-six, shortly after giving birth to the heir. Her portrait is therefore almost certainly posthumous, and the near-transparent pallor of her skin is not only a lighting effect.
3 – Botticelli’s Primavera
Still in room A9 you stand in front of a panel 207 by 319 centimetres, a tempera grassa on wood painted around 1480. Nine figures advance across a flowering meadow in front of a grove of orange trees, and for five centuries nobody has entirely agreed on what is happening.
The most widely accepted reading runs from right to left: Zephyr, the blue wind, seizes the nymph Chloris, who turns into Flora, the woman scattering flowers from her dress. Venus presides at the centre, Cupid shoots an arrow blindfolded above her, and on the left the three Graces dance while Mercury pushes the clouds aside with his caduceus.
What strikes you in person, and what no reproduction conveys, is the meadow: more than five hundred plant species have been counted, many of them botanically identifiable, painted one by one. From a distance it is a dark carpet; up close it is a herbarium.
4 – Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
Next to it, in the same room, hangs the painting everyone came to see: 172.5 by 278.5 centimetres, tempera on canvas, datable to around 1485.
It is worth knowing one thing before you look at it, because it changes what you see. Botticelli’s Venus does not obey anatomy: the neck is too long, the left shoulder drops at an impossible angle, the arm covering her breast could not hold itself that way. These are not mistakes. Botticelli sacrifices the construction of the body to the line of the contour, which runs unbroken from ankle to hair, and the result is a figure that seems to float rather than stand.
It is the exact opposite of what Leonardo was doing in those same years, a few hundred metres away, and the two paintings hang five rooms apart in this museum.
5 – Leonardo’s Annunciation
In room A35 there is a long, low panel, 90 by 222 centimetres, painted in oil around 1472. Leonardo was twenty and working in Verrocchio’s workshop.
The painting has a famous flaw: the Virgin’s right arm is too long, and the lectern in front of her juts out in a way that does not add up. For decades that was used to question the attribution. Then it was understood that the picture was meant to hang high and be seen from the right, and from that viewpoint the distortion corrects itself.
Look instead at the angel’s wings, built on those of a real bird rather than the decorative feathers of tradition, and at the landscape behind, where the harbour and the mountains dissolve into a blue haze. That haze is the first documented appearance of Leonardo’s aerial perspective, the principle everything else would be built on. In the article on five things to know about Leonardo da Vinci I tell how he got there.
6 – Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo
Room A38 holds the only finished panel painting by Michelangelo that has come down to us. It is a tondo 120 centimetres across, tempera grassa on wood, made between 1505 and 1506 for the merchant Agnolo Doni, who had married Maddalena Strozzi the year before.
The Holy Family is twisted on itself in a torsion no painter had attempted before: Mary turns backwards to take the Child from Joseph’s hands, and the three bodies form a pyramid as compact as a dome. Michelangelo is painting as though he were carving, and he says so openly.
Behind a low wall in the background, five nude youths lean against one another with no clear narrative purpose. They are quotations from ancient sculpture, including the Laocoön, which had been dug up in Rome in exactly those years and which Michelangelo had gone to see. He designed the carved frame, with the head of Christ and four prophets, and Francesco del Tasso executed it.
One curious detail: the portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni, painted by Raphael in the same months, have hung in the same room since 2018. Patron and painting found each other again after five hundred years.
7 – Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch
In the same room A38, an oil on panel 107 by 77.2 centimetres, finished before February 1506. Raphael painted it as a wedding gift for his friend Lorenzo Nasi.
The composition is a serene pyramid, the opposite of the Michelangelo twisting a few steps away: Mary reads, the young Saint John hands the goldfinch to the Christ Child, and the three touch in an everyday gesture. The goldfinch, which feeds on thistle seeds, alludes to the crown of thorns.
The history of this painting, however, is dramatic. In 1547 the Nasi house collapsed in a landslide and the panel broke into seventeen fragments. It was put back together with nails and filler, and for centuries we saw it through those repairs. The restoration completed in 2008, after ten years of work, removed the old additions and gave back the original colours: what you see today is far closer to Raphael than the same work was twenty years ago.
8 – Titian’s Venus of Urbino
Now you go down to the first floor. In room D22, behind shatterproof glass that keeps the microclimate stable, hangs an oil on canvas 119 by 165 centimetres, dated 1538.
For centuries the painting was read as a mythological nude, and it is not. The reclining woman has no divine attributes: she is a young Venetian bride, shown during the domestic ritual of the toccamano, the ceremony in which the promised woman gave her consent to marriage by touching the groom’s hand. The little dog asleep at the foot of the bed is marital fidelity, the roses are the constancy of love, the pot of myrtle on the sill is the plant of Venus. In the background two servants prepare the wedding dress in gold and pale blue.
Guidobaldo II della Rovere bought it directly from Titian in 1538, and it reached Florence in the dowry of Vittoria della Rovere, the family’s last heir and wife of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici. Beside it hang Titian’s own Flora and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Fornarina: if the painter interests you, I have written about Titian’s revolution in colour.
9 – Caravaggio’s Medusa
In the rooms given over to Caravaggio and the seventeenth century, inside a case set against a large red panel, there is an object that is not a painting: it is a parade shield, wood covered with canvas, painted around 1598.
For a long time it was believed to be a sixteenth-century shield simply repainted. X-ray examination established that the work is entirely by Caravaggio, gilded ornaments included.
Caravaggio does not show the moment when Perseus kills the Gorgon. He shows the head already severed, with blood spurting from the neck and the mouth open in a scream, in the instant before consciousness goes out. The surface is convex, so the face bulges towards you, and the model for it was probably Caravaggio himself, painting his own likeness in the act of dying. In the article on Caravaggio’s paintings you will find the rest of his story.
10 – Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes
In room D29, named after Caravaggio and Artemisia, an oil on canvas 146.5 by 108 centimetres, painted around 1620.
Artemisia Gentileschi had already treated the same subject a few years earlier. This is the mature version, made after her seven Florentine years in the service of the Medici and her return to Rome, where she was able to see Caravaggio’s work again.
What separates it from every Judith painted before lies in the arms. The other versions show the heroine afterwards, head already in hand, wearing a composed expression. Here Judith and her maid Abra are working: they brace their elbows, they hold down a man far heavier than they are, and the blade goes into the neck while blood spatters as far as the sleeve. It is a scene of physical effort, and no male painter had ever seen it that way. I have told Artemisia’s life, and the trial that marked it, in a dedicated article.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official website of the Uffizi Galleries. Prices and opening times change from season to season: before you travel, check on uffizi.it, which is the official site, and remember that the only genuine ticket office is tickets.uffizi.it. Everything else is a reseller charging a mark-up.
Tickets. A full ticket bought on the day at the desk costs 25 euros. The same ticket booked online in advance costs 29 euros, because the official booking fee is added to the price. Since 1 January 2026 there is an afternoon rate of 16 euros, valid for entry from 4 p.m. onwards. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and applies to citizens of the European Union, plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, aged between 18 and 25.
Opening times. Tuesday to Sunday 8.15-18.30, with last admission at 17.30. The museum is closed on Mondays, on 25 December and on 1 January.
Free entry. Admission is free for under-18s and on the first Sunday of every month, when the museum opens with its ordinary timetable. On free Sundays there is no booking, so the queue at the desk is long and it is worth turning up at opening time.
Getting there. The museum is at Piazzale degli Uffizi 6, a few steps from Piazza della Signoria, and you can cross the centre of Florence on foot in twenty minutes from anywhere. Santa Maria Novella station is a little over a kilometre away.
How long it takes. The ten works on this list take about two hours at an unhurried pace. For the full route, including the seventeenth-century rooms and the terrace, allow three and a half hours.
What to bear in mind. The Uffizi has no large cloakroom and big rucksacks must be left in storage, which adds time at the entrance. The best light for the West Corridor, the one with windows over the Arno, is late afternoon, which is also when the reduced rate applies.
If you would rather not think about it, you can book priority entry to the Uffizi Gallery and pick whichever time slot suits you.
What to see nearby
The Uffizi opens onto Piazza della Signoria and the Ponte Vecchio, so the day builds itself: I have put together a complete route in the itinerary on what to see in Florence in two days.
If you would rather stay with Tuscan painting, Piero della Francesca’s Brera Altarpiece covers that artist’s other great work, and the guides to Siena, Pisa and Pistoia cover the three cities where the same story continues outside Florence.
