Dante's House Museum

Casa di Dante tickets: €8 at the door, no booking

The Casa di Dante is Florence’s museum of Dante Alighieri, the poet who wrote the Divine Comedy, and it stands on Via Santa Margherita, among the medieval buildings where the Alighieri family had their houses. Dante was born in Florence in 1265, and the museum’s three floors tell his life, up to a room on the Divine Comedy where projections play over a great open book.

Getting in is about as simple as it gets in Florence. You buy your ticket at the entrance and walk in, with no time slot and nothing to book, which is why we don’t sell one. The museum is run privately, by a local association called the Unione Fiorentina, so the free days of Florence’s state museums don’t apply here: there’s no free first Sunday.

Groups should know that their entry can be suspended on public holidays, the days before them and busy periods, because the rooms are small. And if you see €4 and €2 on another site, those are old prices.

Dante’s House with the Firenze Card: included, nothing to book

The Firenze Card includes the Casa di Dante, and on your own there’s no booking to make: you show the card at the door and go in. Groups of cardholders are the exception. They can be up to 10 people and must book, for free, by email to the museum at prenotazioni@museocasadidante.it.

The card is Florence’s official museum pass, €94 for 72 hours from your first entry, with about 60 museums included once each. An €8 entry like this one won’t decide whether it’s worth it. The card pays off from five or six paid museums, while with just the Uffizi and the Accademia it loses, and our page on Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes does the sums for your own list.

The Uffizi’s PassePartout and the other passes leave the Casa di Dante out.

Casa di Dante opening hours: every day, 10:00 to 18:00

The museum opens every day of the week, Mondays included, with the last entry half an hour before closing. The only days it closes are 24 and 25 December.

You may come across an older winter timetable with Mondays closed and earlier closing on weekdays. The museum’s own page now gives the same hours every day.

Three floors of Dante’s life inside the Casa di Dante

The visit climbs through three floors, each given to a stage of Dante’s life. The first is about the 13th-century Florence he grew up in, with documents on his youth and on the guild of Physicians and Apothecaries he belonged to, and a reconstruction of the battle of Campaldino.

Upstairs, the second floor is where the Divine Comedy room is. Its projections and the rest of the multimedia displays went in on 24 June 2020, and before that the museum was mostly information panels.

What you see are copies and reconstructions: recreated documents and objects, and reproductions of paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Castagno and Ghirlandaio. There are no originals of Dante’s work here, so come for the story of his life rather than for manuscripts.

Everything is explained in Italian and English. A lift takes you up to the second floor, but the third floor and the workshop room are reached only by stairs. If you want a look before you go, the museum’s website has a 360° virtual tour in both languages.

Is the Casa di Dante the house where Dante was born?

The building isn’t. The city rebuilt it around 1910, on what Lonely Planet calls the foundations of Dante’s home, and very little of the original survives. The museum says Dante was born where it now stands, while other guides think he was probably born in another house in the same neighbourhood.

The spot itself comes from paperwork. The Alighieri family was taken to court because the roots of a fig tree had damaged the wall of a church, and the records of that case are what place them on this street.

The museum came long after the rebuilding. The Unione Fiorentina was founded in 1949 with this museum as one of its first aims, and in 1960 it won permission to set up the museum in the house, which until then held city offices. It opened to the public in May 1965.

Via Santa Margherita and Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi, Dante’s church

The museum is at Via Santa Margherita 1, near the Torre della Castagna, a medieval tower, and close to the Duomo and the Uffizi, so it fits easily between the two on foot.

Before you leave, walk a little further up the street to Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi, an 11th-century church known as Dante’s church. Tradition says he saw Beatrice there and married Gemma Donati in it, and both women are said to be buried inside.