National Archaeological Museum of Florence

Archaeological Museum Florence tickets: €8, online or at the door

The Archaeological Museum in Florence, home of the Chimera of Arezzo, has one ticket for the whole collection, at €8. You can buy it at the ticket office on the day or from CoopCulture, the museum’s official ticket site, and the museum strongly recommends buying online so you walk straight in. Booking a time isn’t compulsory.

We don’t sell this ticket. The Firenze Card, which we do sell, includes entry here, and it has its own section further down.

The free list also covers licensed tourist guides and interpreters, and teachers and students of architecture, conservation, education and humanities degrees with an archaeology or art history track.

Florence Archaeological Museum opening hours, and the Sundays it’s closed

Plan the day around the clock here, because most days the museum closes at 14:00. The only afternoons that run until 19:00 are Tuesday and Thursday from October to May, and just Thursday in summer. On Sundays it opens only on the first of the month and on public holidays.

The last entry, and the last ticket at the desk, is 45 minutes before closing: 13:15 on the short days, 18:15 on the long ones. The second floor closes 30 minutes before the rest, and it can also close when the museum is short of staff. That’s where the Greek pottery and the François Vase are, so if they’re on your list, head upstairs first.

Until December the museum adds evenings and Saturday afternoons to that timetable. On Wednesday 11 and 25 November it stays open from 18:00 to 22:00, the second date for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. On Saturdays from 7 November it also opens from 14:00 to 18:00, and 12 December is the last of those dates we’ve seen.

The Archaeological Museum on the Firenze Card: one entry, no slot to book

With hours this short, it helps that the Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, gets you in without booking anything. Entry is included once, and there’s no time to reserve here, unlike at the Uffizi, the Accademia or the Palazzo Vecchio, where cardholders book a slot.

The card’s 72 hours start at your first entry and cover about 60 museums, and it pays off from five or six paid museums. An €8 ticket won’t justify it alone, so count this museum as one stop among several, fitted into a morning or a long Tuesday or Thursday from October to May. And don’t spend the card’s entry here on the first Sunday, when everyone goes in free anyway.

Florence’s other passes don’t cover it: the Uffizi Passepartout and the Duomo passes both leave it out. Our page on Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them side by side, and you buy the Firenze Card through GetYourGuide.

What you see at Florence’s Archaeological Museum: the Chimera, the Orator and the François Vase

The Chimera of Arezzo is the monster of Greek myth cast in bronze by the Etruscans, the people of ancient Tuscany: a lion with a goat’s head rising from its back and a snake for a tail. It came out of the ground near Arezzo in 1553, and it stands on a low wooden plinth.

The bronzes go on with the Arringatore, the Orator, an Etruscan-Roman statue from the end of the 2nd or the start of the 1st century BC, and the Minerva of Arezzo, a Roman copy in bronze.

From Chiusi, in southern Tuscany, comes the terracotta sarcophagus of Larthia Seianti, an Etruscan woman shown reclining on the lid, still painted, with rosettes along the front of the chest. The palace also holds the museum’s Egyptian collection, a major one in its own right.

Upstairs, on the second floor, are the Greek pots and the François Vase, a krater (a big bowl for mixing wine) painted in black figures around 570 BC and signed by the potter Ergotimos and the painter Kleitias. It was found in 1844 in an Etruscan tomb at Fonte Rotella, on the road to Chiusi. Archaic kouroi, Greek statues of young men, stand in a corridor. You’ll see the palace garden only from inside, because it isn’t open to the public.

How the Medici antiquities reached the Palazzo della Crocetta, and the 1966 flood

Those pieces once sat in the Uffizi. The Medici collected them, and so did the house of Lorraine, the grand dukes who ruled Tuscany after them. In the late 19th century the new Italian kingdom split up the Uffizi collections and gave the antiquities a state museum of their own here, in the 17th-century Palazzo della Crocetta.

On 4 November 1966 the Arno flooded Florence, and the water wiped out the museum’s Topographical Museum completely. That’s why, sixty years on, 4 November 2026 was a free day with an evening opening.

Getting to the Archaeological Museum and its Via della Colonna entrance