Brancacci Chapel

Brancacci Chapel tickets: ten people at a time, for 30 minutes

The Brancacci Chapel is small, and the visits are run to match. Groups of up to ten people go in together and stay for 30 minutes, a rule the chapel sets, not a suggestion. Booking a time is recommended, and with only ten places in each slot, it’s how you make sure of getting in on the day you want.

The ticket we sell, at €30, gets you into the chapel, and on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays the combo ticket adds the Fondazione Salvatore Romano. It’s listed as an English guided tour, so check the time and meeting point on the booking page. You can cancel up to 24 hours before, and there are reduced and child options at checkout.

When you arrive, look for the chapel’s own door. The chapel and the church it belongs to have separate entrances, and the chapel’s ticket office is at Piazza del Carmine 14.

The Brancacci Chapel with the Firenze Card: included, with a slot to book

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes the Brancacci Chapel. With the card, booking stops being optional: you reserve a slot before you go, at no cost, and every cardholder needs a booking of their own, children on the card included. Once it’s made it can’t be changed, so book when your plans are settled.

The card costs €94, runs for 72 hours from your first entry and gets you into each of about 60 museums once. It starts to pay off from five or six paid museums, so the chapel makes sense on it as one stop among several, and Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes does the sum for you. Florence’s other passes, such as the Uffizi’s, don’t include the chapel.

Brancacci Chapel opening hours: six days a week, Sunday afternoons only

The chapel opens on Mondays, which is handy in Florence, where the Uffizi and the Accademia close for the day. The chapel takes its day off on Tuesday instead, and on Sundays it opens only in the afternoon.

If you’ve read that the chapel only opens on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays, that’s the timetable of its guided visits, which run on those days and on Sunday afternoons. The chapel itself is open six days a week.

Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi: the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel

Your 30 minutes go on the walls. The chapel was built before 1386 in the right arm of the church’s transept, and around 1423 two painters, Masolino and Masaccio, began covering it with the life of the apostle Peter.

They worked side by side, and you can tell them apart. Masaccio painted solid, weighty figures set in rigorous perspective, while Masolino kept to the elegant late Gothic style. In The Tribute Money, Christ and the apostles stand around the tax collector as one heavy group.

Masaccio also painted Adam and Eve being driven out of Eden. The two nude figures walk forward weeping, and it’s one of the scenes to look for as soon as you’re inside.

Then the cycle was left unfinished for decades. In the meantime, around the middle of the 15th century, the chapel was dedicated to the Madonna del Popolo, with a panel of the Virgin and Child by an unknown Florentine painter of the 13th century. Around 1485 a third painter, Filippino Lippi, finished the story of Peter, mostly on the right wall.

Getting to the Brancacci Chapel on Piazza del Carmine

The chapel is in the Oltrarno, the part of Florence on the far side of the Arno from the Duomo, at Piazza del Carmine 14. Florence has no metro, so from the centre you walk across the river to the square.

For wheelchair users there’s a route from the square through the cloister to the Sala Capitolare, the chapter house, and a lift from the cloister to the chapel. The cloister also has an accessible toilet.