Bargello Museum

Bargello tickets: entry with the exhibition and a Florence audio guide

The Bargello is Florence’s museum of sculpture, in the city’s oldest public building, and the piece people come to find is Michelangelo’s Bacchus, the first large statue he made in Rome. The ticket we sell costs €20 and covers the entry, the temporary exhibition and the booking costs, plus a digital audio guide app to the whole city of Florence.

You don’t have to buy it ahead, though: booking isn’t compulsory at the Bargello, and outside high season its timed slots matter less here than at the Uffizi or the Accademia. Buying ahead just means the ticket is already on your phone when you arrive.

Some visitors pay nothing, or very little: under-18s go in free on any day, and EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay a reduced price. On the first Sunday of the month the Bargello, like Italy’s other state museums, is free for everyone.

The Bargello on the Firenze Card: one included entry, no slot to book

The Firenze Card includes the Bargello as one entry, and the museum isn’t on the card’s list of places you have to book, as the Uffizi, the Accademia and the Palazzo Vecchio are. You turn up with the card and go in.

The card itself costs €94 and runs for 72 hours from your first entry, with about 60 museums included once each, though not the Duomo. You buy it through GetYourGuide. It pays off from five or six paid museums, so it suits a full Florence list.

The Uffizi’s PassePartout and the Duomo passes leave the Bargello out. Our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes shows what each one does include.

Bargello opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Mondays

Since 15 March 2026 the Bargello and the Accademia Gallery have been run by a single institute, and the Bargello now keeps the same hours as the rest of the group: 8:15 to 18:50, six days a week. Plenty of guides still give the old morning-only hours or say it closes on alternate Sundays, and neither applies any more.

The 30 November evening is an extra opening on what would be a closing day, so check the museum’s site nearer the time if you’re planning around it.

Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Donatello and Giambologna inside the Bargello

At the heart of the building is its courtyard, irregular in shape, with the walls covered in the coats of arms of the podestà, the magistrates who governed the city from here in the 13th and 14th centuries. Sixteenth-century statues stand around it.

Inside, Michelangelo’s Bacchus shows the god of wine raising a cup, with a small satyr at his side. In the same rooms, among works by sculptors of his time, is Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo.

Donatello has a room of his own, and his bronze David, the young hero in a wide-brimmed hat standing on Goliath’s head, is the piece guides tend to send you to. Look out too for the bronzes by Giambologna and the pieces by Cellini.

Why it’s called the Bargello: from magistrates’ palace to police headquarters

Those coats of arms in the courtyard belong to the building’s first life. Work began in 1255, and the palace housed the Capitano del Popolo and, from 1261, the podestà, the city’s highest magistrate, which is why it was called the Palazzo del Podestà. It later served as the model for the Palazzo Vecchio.

In 1574 the Medici, the family then ruling Florence, abolished the office of podestà and gave the palace to the bargello, the chief of police, and it has carried his title ever since. It was also a prison, and executions were carried out here, long before its rooms filled with sculpture.

Finding the Bargello on Via del Proconsolo

The entrance is at Via del Proconsolo 4, in the centre of Florence, close to the Duomo and Piazza della Signoria, near enough to walk from either.