My Private Italy: Three Places in Florence for the travellers who think they’ve seen it all

Florence is a city that can exhaust you with beauty. In a single morning you can queue for the Uffizi, crane your neck under Brunelleschi’s dome, stand in front of Michelangelo’s David with three hundred other people holding up their phones, and cross the Ponte Vecchio in a tide of selfie sticks. By lunchtime, many visitors feel they have “done” Florence.

I understand them, and yet every time I come back, I discover that the city has kept something aside. Florence is not only the great museums and the famous squares. It is a hill where monks still sing as the sun goes down, a medieval prison that holds the most revolutionary statue of the Renaissance, and a few streets by the river that tell, if you know how to read them, a story of war and rebirth that most people walk past without noticing.

So, let’s leave the queues behind. Here are three places for those who think they have already seen it all.

San Miniato al Monte: the gate of heaven above the city

Everyone climbs to Piazzale Michelangelo for the famous view over Florence. Very few take the next step: a few minutes further up the hill, along a monumental staircase lined with cypresses, stands one of the most beautiful churches in Italy, San Miniato al Monte.

The church is dedicated to Miniato, or Minias, a Christian of Eastern origin martyred in Florence around 250 AD, during the persecutions of Emperor Decius. According to legend, after being beheaded near the Arno, he picked up his own head, crossed the river and walked up this hill to the cave where he wished to be buried. A legend, of course. But in 1013, the Bishop of Florence began building a church over the spot, and it has stood here ever since.

Look at the façade before you go in. The geometric patterns of white Carrara marble and green Prato serpentine are the purest expression of the Florentine Romanesque, a style that would later inspire the Baptistery and the cathedral itself. At the top, a golden mosaic shows Christ between the Virgin and Saint Minias, and above it all sits a bronze eagle clutching a bale of cloth: the symbol of the Arte di Calimala, the powerful wool merchants’ guild that paid for the church’s upkeep for centuries. In Florence, even heaven had its sponsors.

Inside, don’t miss the marble floor of 1207, inlaid with lions, doves and the signs of the zodiac. It is not just decoration: scholars have shown that on the summer solstice a ray of sunlight from a window falls precisely on the sign of Cancer, turning the church into a giant calendar of stone and light.

Then step into the Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal. James of Portugal, a prince of the Portuguese royal house, was made a cardinal very young and died in Florence in 1459, at just twenty-five. His chapel, built in the 1460s, is a small Renaissance masterpiece: Antonio Rossellino carved the tomb, Luca della Robbia covered the ceiling in glazed terracotta of white and blue, and the Pollaiolo brothers painted the altarpiece, whose original now hangs in the Uffizi.

The bell tower has a story of its own. During the siege of Florence in 1529–30, the city’s defences on this hill were organised by none other than Michelangelo, and to protect the tower from enemy cannon fire, he had it wrapped in woollen mattresses. It worked.

But my favourite moment comes at the end of the day. The church is still home to a community of Olivetan monks, and every day, in the late afternoon, at a time that shifts with the seasons, they sing Vespers in Gregorian chant. Sit in the half-light of the crypt while their voices fill the ancient stones, then step outside as the sun sets behind the domes of Florence. Before you leave, walk through the small monumental cemetery of the Porte Sante: here lies Carlo Collodi, the man who gave the world Pinocchio.

The Bargello: from a medieval prison to the boy who changed sculpture

Our second stop is in the heart of the city, a few minutes from Piazza della Signoria, yet it is one of the quietest museums in Florence. From the outside, the Bargello looks like a fortress, with its battlements and its tall tower. Its history is just as severe.

Built around 1255, it is the oldest public building in Florence, first the seat of the Capitano del Popolo, then of the Podestà, the magistrate who administered justice. From the 16th century, it housed the Bargello, the chief of police, and it became a prison. Executions took place in its courtyard, and the bodies of traitors were sometimes hung from its windows. In 1479, one of the men behind the Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici, Bernardo Baroncelli, was hanged here; a young Leonardo da Vinci was in the crowd and made a precise sketch of the hanging man, noting the colours of his clothes. That drawing still exists.

In 1865 the prison closed, and the palace became Italy’s National Museum of Sculpture. Today, where prisoners once suffered, you will find the world’s greatest collection of Renaissance sculpture.

Everyone in Florence goes to see Michelangelo’s David; far fewer come to meet his older brother. In the great hall of the Bargello stands Donatello’s bronze David, made around the 1440s for the Medici, and it is, for me, one of the most astonishing works of art in Italy.

It is just over one and a half metres tall. David is not a muscular hero, but a slender, almost fragile adolescent, wearing nothing but a shepherd’s hat crowned with laurel and a pair of boots, his foot resting on Goliath’s severed head, a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips. It was the first free-standing nude statue cast in bronze since antiquity, and its sensual, ambiguous beauty must have shocked the Florentines of the time. Here’s the trick I always suggest: walk slowly all around it. From every angle, David changes, and you will understand why sculptors still come here to study him.

In the same museum, look for two small bronze panels, both showing the Sacrifice of Isaac. They are the entries of Brunelleschi and Ghiberti for the famous competition of 1401 to design the new doors of the Baptistery, the contest many historians see as the starting point of the Renaissance. Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi, so the story goes, was so offended that he left sculpture behind, went to Rome to study ancient architecture, and came back to build the dome. Sometimes losing is the best thing that can happen to a genius. Add Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Donatello’s Saint George and Cellini’s bronzes, and you have a museum that deserves at least two unhurried hours.

Around the Ponte Vecchio: the streets the war erased

Our last stop is not a museum, nor a church. It is a walk around the most famous bridge in Florence, and it hides a story I find deeply moving.

On the night of 3–4 August 1944, as the Allies advanced on Florence, the retreating German troops blew up every bridge over the Arno, including the beloved Ponte Santa Trinita, built by Bartolomeo Ammannati in the 1560s, probably with a contribution from Michelangelo, and considered by many the most beautiful bridge in the world.

Santa Trinita did not give in easily. Its three low, elegant arches, often described as the oldest elliptical arches of any bridge in the world, made it astonishingly strong, and the first charges failed to bring it down. The German sappers had to wrap the arches in a cage of mines and explosives, and it took three attempts during the night before the bridge finally collapsed, at around five in the morning of 4 August. The blasts were so violent that, according to some accounts, fragments of its stone were hurled as far as Via de’ Cerretani, more than 500 metres (a third of a mile) from the river.

Of all the bridges, only one was spared: Ponte Vecchio. Florentines still argue about why. Some say Hitler himself had admired it during his visit to

Florence in 1938; others credit the German consul, Gerhard Wolf, who loved the city and did everything he could to protect it. Florence did not forget him: in 1955 the city made Wolf an honorary citizen, and a plaque on the Ponte Vecchio still remembers him.

But the bridge was not spared for free. To block access to it, the Germans mined and destroyed the medieval buildings at both of its ends: much of Via Por Santa Maria on one side, and Borgo San Jacopo and the beginning of Via Guicciardini on the other. Houses, shops and tower houses that had stood for six or seven centuries were reduced to rubble in a single night. Among the ruins, legend has it, the partisans used the Vasari Corridor, the secret raised passage of the Medici that runs above the bridge, to cross the river and keep in contact with the other side of the city.

Walk to the bridge from Via Por Santa Maria and look up. Many of the buildings around you are not medieval at all: they were rebuilt in the 1950s, in a sober, modern style that tried to respect the old city without imitating it. Florentines debated for years whether to rebuild “as it was, where it was” or to start again. The result is a mix you can read like a book: here and there a surviving medieval tower, such as the Torre dei Mannelli at the south end of the bridge, where the Vasari Corridor has to bend around it; and next to them, post-war façades that remind you of what was lost.

Then walk a few steps downstream to Ponte Santa Trinita. Here the city chose to rebuild “as it was, where it was”. The work lasted from 1955 to 1958: the original stones recovered from the Arno were measured, numbered and put back in place. For the missing blocks, the old quarry in the Boboli Gardens was reopened, so that the new stone would have the same golden colour as the old.

The four statues of the Seasons, added in 1608 for the wedding of Cosimo II de’ Medici, were also fished out of the river, all except the head of Spring. It was found only in 1961, by workers dredging the Arno, and returned to its place amid the celebrations of the whole city.

Here’s my advice: come back at sunset, stand in the middle of Santa Trinita and look upstream. Ponte Vecchio glows in the last light and the Arno turns the colour of honey. For me, it is the most beautiful view in Florence, from a bridge that once lay at the bottom of the river.

Three places, three stories: a saint who climbed a hill with his head in his hands, a bronze boy who changed the history of art, and a few streets that remind us how fragile beauty can be. Next time you are in Florence, after the Uffizi and the Duomo, give yourself an extra afternoon. Climb to San Miniato, step into the cool silence of the Bargello, and stand at the foot of Ponte Vecchio looking at the buildings around you with new eyes. Florence will thank you by showing you a face that very few visitors ever see.

Ciao da Marcello

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