Uno Minuto with Shannon Kenny - How to Visit Florence for the Day

People often ask me how to visit Florence for the day. Florence is a city so full of priceless treasures in art and architecture that narrowing down the sites you will visit can be overwhelming. My advice is: do not go to Florence to check sites off a list, as you will miss out on appreciating the city as a captivating work of art in and of itself.

Select your top 3 sites to visit, and perhaps plan a secondary lists of sites along the way depending on time. Remember to prepurchase tickets to sites like the Uffizi and the Accademia to skip the line.

Take your time as you walk through the streets and piazzas, noticing how every detail big and small renders the beauty of the whole. Renaissance thinkers believed that if you create something beautiful, people will conduct themselves with respect and virtue in the city. In fact, such humanist understandings of how art contributes to social order greatly contributed to the intersection of power and patronage that produced the treasures we appreciate today.

As an example of this, our amica Alexandra Lawrence of The Florentine newspaper and expert private guide to the city loves the stately elegance of Piazza SS. Annunziata as a site that evokes the ancient idea in Italy of the piazza as stage, where the theater of humanity reassuringly plays out every day.

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