Florence holds more Renaissance art per square metre than anywhere on earth, but the culture here did not stop in 1500. Three days of Fra Angelico's painted cells, Donatello's bronzes, Brunelleschi's grey columns and Oltrarno workshops still cutting gold leaf.
Fra Angelico frescoed a cell for each Dominican friar here between 1440 and 1445 — 44 painted rooms plus the Annunciation at the top of the dormitory stairs. Savonarola's cell holds his desk and hair shirt.
Alberti's green-and-white marble facade fronts a Dominican church holding Masaccio's Trinity of 1427, the first painting built on true mathematical perspective, plus Ghirlandaio's fresco cycle behind the high altar.
Masaccio's 1425 fresco cycle in the Carmine church — the Expulsion from Eden, with its howling Eve, taught a generation of painters, Michelangelo included, how a human body occupies real space and casts real shadow.
An 11th-century Romanesque basilica above Piazzale Michelangelo, its inlaid marble facade essentially unchanged since 1207 and its floor laid with zodiac mosaics. The Olivetan monks still sing vespers in the crypt.
Italy's national sculpture museum, in a 13th-century courthouse and prison. Donatello's bronze David, the first free-standing nude since antiquity, shares the halls with Ghiberti and Brunelleschi's rival Baptistery panels of 1401.
Trading since 1733 and on this square since 1910, with a Belle Époque interior of carved wood, mirrors and stucco. Florentines take espresso and a bomboloni standing at the marble bar rather than sitting under the awning.
The Medici hung these rooms floor to ceiling and they remain that way: eleven Raphaels, Titian's Portrait of a Man, Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid, all beneath Pietro da Cortona's planetary ceiling frescoes instead of white walls.
The city's opera house on Viale Fratelli Rosselli, home to the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Italy's oldest music festival, founded in 1933. The 1,800-seat Sala Zubin Mehta and an open-air rooftop cavea run parallel seasons.
Brunelleschi's last church, a grid of grey pietra serena columns completed after his death, with Michelangelo's youthful wooden crucifix in the sacristy. The surrounding streets still hold gilders, cobblers and frame-makers.
The neighbourhood market Florentines actually shop at, iron-framed since 1873, with produce stalls outside and butchers, a trippaio and Rosticceria da Rocco inside. Lunch is eaten elbow to elbow at communal tables.
Twentieth-century Italian art in a 13th-century former pilgrims' hospital on Piazza Santa Maria Novella — Morandi, de Chirico, Fontana, Marini — with film and photography rooms and a rolling programme of living Italian artists.
A Renaissance convent that served as the city prison until 1985, now a courtyard of artist studios, a bookshop-bar and a stage for readings, DJ sets and live jazz. Cell doors and inmates' graffiti survive on the walls.