*POST UPDATED OCTOBER 2026
Hello, friends — happy weekend! I hope this post finds you well. I am here today to share an absolute behemoth of a travel guide with you: A Complete Guide to Florence, Italy. See, as you may or may not know, Florence is one of my very favourite cities, period. I’ve loved it since I first laid eyes on it back in the summer of 2013. I was just 19-years old then, and Florence encapsulated everything I love about a great city: extremely walkable, beauty around every corner, amazing food, and an abundance of fantastic art. Truly, it was love at first sight. As such, I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve shared more than a couple of posts about it over the years.
Looking through the archives, it would seem that I’ve shared four different guides to the city in the 10-years we’ve been travelling there! Yes, they all weave around a few central spots we adore and can’t help but revisit, but they also all have some new-to-us gems I just couldn’t bear to keep quiet about. There has been: Italian Adventures Part I: Florence / An Ode to Florence, Italy / Three Days in Florence, Italy / and Festive Florence in December.
You might now be thinking — wait, is this another new guide?! Alas, no. See, it recently occurred to me that a new reader looking for information on Florence might not want to read through four different guides looking for recommendations. Which brings us here, to this post: a compilation of all four guides in one place. Handy, no?
As you might expect, this is a whopper of a guide. For ease, I’ve divided everything into the following categories: getting there / where we’ve stayed / where we’ve had coffee & pastries / where we’ve eaten / where we’ve imbibed / where we’ve tourist-ed / map our trip. Naturally, the where we’ve eaten category is sub-divided down even further into panini / dined in / and gelato. My love for sub-categories knows no bounds!
Okay — let’s dive in!
getting there
The annoying thing about Florence is that it is located in between the main airport cities. While the city does have it’s own little airport, Amerigo Vespucci, I have no idea what airlines fly there and don’t know anyone that has ever flown into or out of there. Here’s how we’ve made the journey over the years:
fly into Bologna’s Guglielmo Marconi airport, make your way to Bologna Centrale via taxi or the Marconi Express monorail, and take a high-speed Frecciarossa train into Florence’s Santa Maria Novella from there. All in, if everything goes your way, you could be in Florence in around 1-hour. This is our favourite option because we love all things Bologna, but it isn’t always feasible with flight times.
fly into Pisa airport, walk or take the PISAMOVER shuttle to Pisa Centrale, and take a high-speed Frecciarossa train into Florence’s Santa Maria Novella from there. All in, if everything goes your way, you could be in Florence in about 1.5-hours.
alternatively, there is a company called Sky Bus Lines Caronna that go directly from Pisa airport into Florence’s Santa Maria Novella! They don’t seem to show up on Google Maps, but they saved our butt one wintery night when we arrived into the city at 1am after a 5-hour flight delay; I think they wait for the last flight of the night to arrive, thankfully! The journey time is approx. 1-hour.
fly into Milan Bergamo airport, take a Terravision bus into Milano Centrale, and then a high-speed Frecciarossa from there to Florence’s Santa Maria Novella. All in, if everything goes your way, you could be in Florence in around 3-hours. We tend to avoid this option due to the sheer unpleasantness at Milano Centrale — pickpockets and general troublemakers — but sometimes needs must.