If you are thinking of visiting Pistoia and you do not know where to start, you are in the right place.
I ended up here almost by accident, during a weekend I had planned around Pisa and Lucca. I had half a day free and I spent it here, expecting nothing in particular. It turned out to be the best surprise of that trip.
Pistoia is one of the most overlooked cities in Tuscany, squeezed between far more famous neighbours, and that is exactly why it deserves your time: an intact medieval centre, a goldsmith’s masterpiece with no rival in Europe, and none of the queues waiting for you in Florence.
It is not just my opinion. In 2017 Pistoia was named Italian Capital of Culture, chosen out of nine finalist cities (Como, Parma, Pisa, Spoleto and Taranto were among them). The award came for its artistic and architectural heritage, and for the way the city tells its own story.
If you are travelling around Tuscany by car, Pistoia sits conveniently halfway between Lucca and Florence. If you come by train, even better: the station is a ten-minute walk from the cathedral, so you can arrive and start walking.
In this post I will tell you what to see in Pistoia in one day, in the order I walked it.
Let’s go!
1 – Piazza del Duomo, Pistoia’s medieval living room
Everything that matters in Pistoia faces a single square, and that is its great advantage: Piazza del Duomo gathers the cathedral, the bell tower, the baptistery, the Palazzo Comunale and the Palazzo Pretorio.
Reaching it through the narrow lanes of the old town is a small piece of theatre. The space opens up all at once and you find yourself surrounded by white and green marble on three sides, with the bell tower forcing you to look up.
It is still a living square, not a backdrop for tourists: there is a market, people have their coffee here, teenagers sit on the steps. Take five minutes to look at it before you go inside anything.
2 – The cathedral of San Zeno
A post about what to see in Pistoia can only begin with its cathedral.
The cathedral of San Zeno is far older than it looks: its origins probably go back to the 10th century, even if what you see today is the result of centuries of remodelling. Between 1379 and 1449 the Romanesque façade gained the porch and the three tiers of loggias that give it that unmistakably Pisan rhythm, in white and green bands.
Stand on your toes in front of the central doorway, because that is where most people miss the best piece: the glazed terracotta lunette by Andrea della Robbia, made in 1504-1505, with the Virgin and Child between two angels. After five hundred years that blue still looks fresh out of the kiln.
Inside, the atmosphere is plainer than you might imagine, because between 1598 and 1614 the interior was reworked in Baroque taste (the domed tribune is a design by Jacopo Lafri). But the good things are there, you just have to look for them:
- the baptismal font of 1497, carved by Andrea Ferrucci da Fiesole and Jacopo del Mazza to a design by Benedetto da Maiano, with the Baptism of Christ and biblical scenes around it;
- the fifteenth-century tabernacle of San Donato;
- the crypt, where medieval columns and carved fragments survive, buried underground when room was made for the Baroque altar.
Entrance to the cathedral is free and it can be visited outside service times.
3 – The silver altar of St James, Pistoia’s real treasure
If I had to save one single thing in Pistoia, I would save this.
In the chapel of San Jacopo, on the right, stands the silver altar of St James: a wall of embossed silver with hundreds of figures, stories from the Old and New Testament, saints, prophets, enamels. It is considered the largest piece of sacred goldsmith’s work of the European Middle Ages, and standing in front of it you understand why.
It is not the work of a single artist, and that is the part I love: about a dozen masters worked on it between 1287 and the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1316 the cathedral works commissioned the great central panel from Andrea di Jacopo d’Ognabene, who carved the New Testament stories on it. And around 1400, before becoming the man of the Florence dome, a very young Filippo Brunelleschi worked on it too: some of the figures of saints and prophets are attributed to him.
But why all this silver in Pistoia of all places?
Because of a relic. In 1145 bishop Atto obtained from the archbishop of Compostela, Diego Gelmírez, a fragment of the skull of the apostle James: the only officially recognised Jacobean relic in Italy. From that moment Pistoia became a stop for pilgrims heading to Santiago, so much so that it is still called the “lesser Santiago”. The altar is the city’s answer to that gift: four centuries of silver piled up to keep it properly.
Admiring it costs a few euros (2 € when I visited, but check on site). It is the best money you will spend all day.
The odd story: the thief who ended up in Hell
Here is a detail that will make you look at the sacristy differently. At the beginning of 1293 the treasure of San Jacopo was robbed, and the culprit was Vanni Fucci, a Pistoian of the Black faction. The sacrilegious theft earned him a place in the seventh ditch of Dante’s Inferno, in cantos XXIV and XXV, where Dante meets him bitten by snakes and hears him hurl at God the crudest gesture imaginable.
Dante, who had a very low opinion of Pistoia, takes the chance to wish the city would burn itself to ashes. I would say the city has taken its revenge rather well.
4 – The bell tower, 67 metres on top of a Lombard tower
The bell tower of Pistoia cathedral is the symbol of the city, and it looks like no other bell tower in Tuscany.
The reason is that it was not born as a bell tower: at its base there is an ancient Lombard tower, adapted over the centuries and (according to Vasari) restructured by Giovanni Pisano. Above the stone shaft open three tiers of loggias with white and green columns, in Pisan-Lucchese taste, and at the top run the swallow-tail Ghibelline battlements. The terracotta spire has been rebuilt several times, first because of medieval earthquakes, then during the restorations of the early twentieth century.
It reaches 66.85 metres to the cross, which is the 67 metres you will read everywhere, and counts nine levels. Inside there is still a bell from 1314.
You can climb it, more than two hundred steps, for a 360-degree view over Tuscany. One warning though: when I updated this post (July 2026) visits to the bell tower were listed as temporarily suspended. Before counting on that view, stop by the IAT tourist office in Piazza del Duomo or call the cathedral.
5 – The baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte
Right opposite the cathedral stands the building that won me over most, purely for looks: the baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte, an octagon entirely clad in white and green marble, hugely elegant.
The decision to build it was taken in 1303. Work on the external cladding was entrusted around 1325 to Cellino di Nese, to a design by Andrea Pisano, and was finished around 1339: more than thirty years to make a suit for a building, which is more or less the definition of Tuscan Gothic.
Inside, the surprise: the font is much older than the baptistery that holds it. A restoration in 1975 revealed on the floral panels the date 1226 and the name of the sculptor, Lanfranco da Como. A basin that has baptised the people of Pistoia for eight centuries.
6 – Palazzo Comunale, Palazzo Pretorio and the Museo Civico
The two palaces of power face each other on the same square.
The Palazzo Comunale was begun in 1294 as the seat of the Anziani and the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, the magistracies that governed the city. Look at the arches of the façade: above each one there is a coat of arms, and together they tell the whole political history of Pistoia in three symbols. In the centre the Guelph arms, on the right those of the city, on the left the lily of Florence, which is the elegant way of saying who was in charge in the end.
Inside is the Museo Civico d’arte antica, with Pistoian painting from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century: small, quiet, and no queue at all.
Next door, the Palazzo Pretorio (or Palazzo del Podestà) was built in 1367 to house the podestà and his men, meaning police and justice. The thing to see is the courtyard, papered with coats of arms in stone, marble, terracotta and fresco, left by the magistrates who succeeded one another in here. Many of them, though, are reproductions from the nineteenth-century restoration, so do not trust the patina too much.
One detail I love and no guidebook points out: under the portico of the Palazzo Comunale a comparison plaque of measures is set into the wall, with the double Tuscan braccio and the metre side by side as two iron bars. It is the exact moment when unified Italy filed away local measurements, left there on the wall to read.
7 – The churches of Pistoia (where the pulpits hide)
This is the part that makes Pistoia a small capital of medieval sculpture. Within a few minutes on foot you find three churches with three masterpieces, and all of them are free to enter.
Sant’Andrea has a façade in green and white bands with an extraordinary doorway: the architrave carved by Gruamonte tells the journey of the Magi, with the horsemen in a row looking as if they had stepped out of an illuminated manuscript. But the reason to go in is inside, and I wrote a whole post about it: the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano, finished in 1301, one of the peaks of European Gothic sculpture.
San Giovanni Fuorcivitas shows you its flank first, and that flank is thirty metres long, striped in white and green Prato marble, built between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. It is so scenic that you forget it is only a side. Inside there is the 1270 pulpit by Fra Guglielmo da Pisa, a pupil of Nicola Pisano, and the Visitation by Luca della Robbia (around 1445), a group in white glazed terracotta: the oldest free-standing example of that technique to come out of his workshop.
The basilica of the Madonna dell’Umiltà is the Renaissance surprise. Designed on an idea by Giuliano da Sangallo and built by Ventura Vitoni, it stood for decades as an enormous roofless octagon towering over the city. In 1561 Cosimo I decided to finish it and handed the job to Giorgio Vasari, who redesigned the dome: 25 metres across, 59 metres high. The church was opened for worship on 31 December 1582, and in 1584 Bartolomeo Ammannati and Jacopo Lafri completed the consolidation work. Yes: there is a Vasari dome in Pistoia, and almost nobody is there to look at it.
8 – The Ospedale del Ceppo and its Robbia frieze
If you still have an hour, walk five minutes away from Piazza del Duomo and go and see the Ospedale del Ceppo. Above its loggia runs the most beautiful glazed terracotta frieze I know of on a civic building.
It was made between 1526 and 1528 by Giovanni della Robbia and Santi Buglioni. The seven panels depict the works of mercy, alternating with the cardinal and theological virtues, with a lunette of the Coronation of the Virgin and roundels with scenes from the life of Mary. The panels also show the man who commissioned it, hospital administrator Leonardo Buonafede, portrayed performing the works of charity himself.
The frieze has an interrupted history: between the death of Giovanni della Robbia and the arrival of the plague the work stopped, and one panel (giving drink to the thirsty) was completed fifty years later by the Pistoian Filippo di Lorenzo Paladini.
But what makes it unique is something else: the figures are dressed as people were in the sixteenth century and the scenes are set in contemporary interiors. This is not a sacred scene outside time, it is a reportage of the charitable life of an Italian city in the sixteenth century, in glazed ceramic.
In the same complex you can visit the small museum of surgical instruments and the Pistoia Sotterranea underground route, along the covered stream that runs beneath the hospital.
If you have time left: Marino Marini
Pistoia is the birthplace of Marino Marini (1901-1980), one of the greatest Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, the man of horses and riders. The Museo Marino Marini, in Palazzo del Tau, holds a huge body of his work: sculptures, drawings, prints and paintings.
A warning, though: in recent years the museum has had a difficult life, with long closures and special openings by reservation. If Marini is the reason you want to come to Pistoia, check that it is open first.
A short history of Pistoia
The story of this city begins long before the white and green marble.
There were Etruscan settlements here and, up in the mountains, Ligurian ones. In the 2nd century BC the Romans made Pistoria an oppidum on the Via Cassia, the road linking Rome to Lucca and Florence, with the job of supplying the troops fighting the Ligurians of the Apennines. The name may well come from that very function, from the pistores, the bakers who milled grain for the legions: it is the most repeated theory, not a certainty.
Then comes the moment when Pistoia enters Roman history with a capital H. In 62 BC, in the mountains above the city, the battle that ended Catiline’s conspiracy was fought: Catiline died here, and Sallust tells us so.
In the Middle Ages the city became a free commune in 1105 and in 1117 it approved the Statuto dei consoli, the oldest surviving written collection of laws of a medieval commune: a record the people of Pistoia are rightly proud of.
It was also a quarrelsome city. Tradition has it that the split between Whites and Blacks was born right here, before spreading to Florence and overturning Dante’s own life (and, as you read above, he never forgave it). Freedom ended on 11 April 1306: after an eleven-month siege Pistoia surrendered to Florence and Lucca.
One last thing, which explains the landscape you see on the way in: since the eighteenth century this plain has been one of the largest plant nursery districts in Europe. The ornamental plants of half the continent are born here.
Practical information for visiting Pistoia
Getting there. By train Pistoia is on the Florence-Lucca-Viareggio line: from Florence Santa Maria Novella it takes about 40-50 minutes on the regional trains, from Lucca a little more. The station is a few minutes’ walk from the centre, so you do not need a car. By car you are halfway between Lucca and Florence, handy as a stop.
How long you need. The centre can all be walked in one relaxed day. I stayed half a day and missed the Ceppo and the Madonna dell’Umiltà, so count on a full day if you want to see everything without rushing.
Tickets. The good news is that almost everything is free: the cathedral, Sant’Andrea, San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, the Madonna dell’Umiltà. You only pay for the silver altar (a couple of euros), the Museo Civico and the Ceppo routes. Always check opening times before you travel, especially for the bell tower and the Marini museum.
With a guide. Since entrance fees here are low or nothing at all, the only thing really worth buying in Pistoia is the storytelling: here you can find the guided tours and experiences available in the city, useful if you want to tie cathedral, pulpits and friezes together without studying it all beforehand.
When to go. Spring and early autumn are perfect. In July the city fills up for Pistoia Blues, which is wonderful but completely changes the rhythm of the centre.
Pistoia sits right at the centre of one of the densest art triangles in Italy, and the smartest thing is to use it as a base or as a stop. A few minutes by train await Pisa and its lesser-known places, Piazza dei Miracoli, the mysteries of Lucca cathedral and, a little further out, Siena. If sculpture is what won you over, there is only one next step: the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano.
And you, had you ever considered it as a destination, or have you always skipped it to go to Florence?
