Florence charges €25 for the Uffizi, but the city's best hours cost nothing: Brunelleschi's colonnades, Botticelli's grave, a rose garden above the Arno. Eat at the market counters locals use, sleep in the Oltrarno, walk everywhere.
Brunelleschi's last church, completed after his death in 1446 — 38 semicircular side chapels and a grey pietra serena colonnade, entry free from 10:00. The sacristy holds Michelangelo's wooden Crucifix, carved at 17, for €2.
The Franciscan church where Botticelli is buried, free to enter. Ghirlandaio's 1480 St Jerome faces Botticelli's St Augustine across the nave, and the adjoining refectory's Last Supper fresco is also free on morning openings.
Florence's only square arcaded on three sides. Brunelleschi's Ospedale degli Innocenti loggia of 1419 and Andrea della Robbia's blue-and-white foundling roundels read fully from the pavement, and the church's Chiostrino dei Voti is free.
The bridge Florentines actually stand on to photograph the Ponte Vecchio, rebuilt stone by stone from the Arno riverbed after its 1944 demolition. No queue, no ticket, and its flattened elliptical arches frame the goldsmiths' shops.
Giuseppe Mengoni's 1874 iron-and-glass hall. The ground-floor stalls run 07:00–15:00: Nerbone has sold boiled-beef panini since 1872 for roughly €4.50, and vendors cut pecorino wedges for €3–5 rather than tourist-shop prices.
The schiacciata counter that opened four shopfronts on one street just to split its own queue. Sandwiches run €7–9, packed with finocchiona salami, truffle cream and pecorino, and they are big enough to count as two meals.
The market Florentines shop at, ten minutes east of the crowds, open 07:00–14:00 Monday to Saturday. Inside, Trattoria da Rocco serves two courses with wine for about €12; the outdoor stalls sell fruit at roughly half centre prices.
The Oltrarno's student square at dusk. Volume, a former hat-maker's workshop with the wooden moulds still fixed to the walls, pours a spritz around €8 with taglieri nibbles included, and the basilica steps are free seating.
A terraced rose garden on the slope just below Piazzale Michelangelo, free every day from 09:00. Around 350 rose varieties, a Japanese oak garden donated by Kyoto in 1998, and twelve Jean-Michel Folon bronzes set among the beds.
Giuseppe Poggi's 1869 terrace with its bronze David copy, open and free at any hour. Climb the Rampe del Poggi — a restored 19th-century sequence of ramps, grottoes and fountains from Piazza Poggi — instead of paying for bus 12 or 13.
The 11th-century green-and-white marble basilica above the piazzale, free to enter and far quieter than the terrace below. Benedictine monks sing Gregorian vespers in the crypt in the late afternoon, and the cemetery holds Carlo Collodi.
Bus 7 leaves Piazza San Marco and climbs 300 metres to the Etruscan hill town in about 25 minutes. From the terrace beside Fiesole's cathedral the whole Arno basin opens up, and the steep walk up Via San Francesco costs nothing at all.