Florence keeps 2,500 years within walking distance: an Etruscan bronze chimera, a 1255 prison-palace, Savonarola's cell, a bridge dynamited in 1944 and rebuilt from the riverbed. These three days follow the city's history in order, from Etruscan Tuscany to the 1966 flood.
Italy's leading Etruscan collection fills Palazzo della Crocetta: the bronze Chimera of Arezzo from around 400 BC, the Arringatore orator, and the François Vase of 570 BC. Open Tue-Sun 8:30-14:00, Thursday to 19:00.
A 14th-century wool merchant's house frozen mid-Trecento: rooms painted to imitate hanging textiles, a private well shaft reaching every floor, and one of the earliest indoor latrines in the city. Open 8:15-13:50.
Built in 1255 as the commune's first town hall, later the seat of the police chief and the city's execution yard. It now holds Donatello's bronze David and the 1401 competition panels by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi.
The lanes around Via dei Cerchi and Via del Corso still carry Dante's Florence: the Torre della Castagna of 1282 where the Priors first met, and rows of corbel holes where wooden balconies once jutted over the street.
Franciscan basilica begun in 1294 and Italy's pantheon: Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini are buried here. Plaques in the cloister mark where the 1966 Arno flood reached, roughly five metres up the wall.
Ammannati's 1567 bridge was blown up by retreating German troops in August 1944 and rebuilt stone by stone using masonry dredged from the riverbed, finished in 1958. The Spring statue's head was recovered only in 1961.
The dynasty's mausoleum: Michelangelo's New Sacristy with the Night and Day figures, and the Chapel of the Princes lined in coloured marble. Anna Maria Luisa, the last Medici, willed the family's art to the city in 1737.
Giuseppe Poggi laid out this terrace in 1869, when Florence was capital of the young Kingdom of Italy and the medieval walls were being torn down for his ring boulevards. The bronze David copy arrived by ox cart in 1873.
Cosimo de' Medici paid to rebuild this Dominican convent in 1436 and Fra Angelico frescoed a scene inside every friar's cell. Savonarola's rooms preserve his desk, his hair shirt and fragments of the cloak he was burned in.
The iron-and-brick market hall of 1873 still feeds the working-class Santa Croce quarter, the district hit hardest by the 1966 flood. Tuscan produce and butchers inside, flower and second-hand sellers on the square outside.
Masaccio painted the Expulsion from Eden here around 1425, introducing single-source light and real bodily weight to fresco. The 1771 fire that gutted the church spared the chapel; Michelangelo copied these figures as a youth.
The oldest surviving church in Florence, consecrated in 1018, with a green-and-white marble facade, an inlaid zodiac pavement of 1207 and an 11th-century crypt. Benedictine monks still sing vespers in Gregorian chant.