Fiesole

Fiesole tickets: the Roman theatre, the museums and the combined ticket

Fiesole’s archaeological area, with the Roman theatre, the baths and the temple, has a ticket of its own, and you can add the Archaeological Museum next to it and the Museo Bandini. The Comune di Fiesole, the town council, runs all three and sells the tickets itself at the ticket office, with no time slot to book. We don’t sell them, so you buy at the desk when you arrive.

The price includes a multimedia guide to the archaeological area and the Archaeological Museum. At the desk you hand over a valid ID, which stays there until you finish the visit, so bring a document you can leave behind for a while.

The €12 ticket only works from Friday to Sunday, the days the Museo Bandini is open. The reduced price is for visitors aged 7 to 18, university students and groups of at least 10, and children under 6 go in free. The family ticket covers up to 2 adults and 4 children under 18.

Fiesole on the Firenze Card: the theatre, two museums and the Primo Conti Foundation

Three of the Firenze Card’s museums outside Florence are up here: the archaeological area with the Archaeological Museum, the Museo Bandini and the Primo Conti Foundation, each once. Fiesole isn’t on the list of museums the card makes you book, so you show it at the desk and go in.

The card costs €94 and runs for 72 hours from your first entry, and it doesn’t include the bus. A day in Fiesole alone won’t pay for it, since the full ticket here is €12. The card pays off from five or six paid museums, and Fiesole’s three entries are a good addition to a list built around Florence. If you want the Bandini too, make it a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, the only days it opens.

You can buy the card through GetYourGuide. The Uffizi and Accademia combo, the Uffizi PassePartout and the Pitti and Boboli pass don’t include Fiesole, and our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets all of them side by side.

Getting to Fiesole from Florence on bus 7

With or without the card, you get up the hill by bus. Bus 7 leaves from Via La Pira, on the north side of Piazza San Marco, and climbs to Piazza Mino, the last stop, in 20 to 25 minutes.

Fiesole looks out over the valleys of the Arno and the Mugnone, and from the top you see the whole of Florence spread across the plain, the cathedral dome in the middle.

Fiesole opening hours: every day until October, then closing at 15:00

The archaeological area and the Archaeological Museum keep the same hours, and they’re open on public holidays and on Mondays, when many Florence museums close. The Museo Bandini follows the same times, but only from Friday to Sunday.

From 1 November the day gets short: the ticket office closes at 14:30, so a morning bus gives you time for the theatre and the museum without watching the clock.

The Roman theatre, baths and temple in Fiesole’s archaeological area

The archaeological area keeps two towns side by side: the Etruscan Fiesole, built by the people who lived here before the Romans, and the Roman one that came after. The theatre is the centre of it: semicircular stone tiers around a paved orchestra, built between the end of the 1st century BC and the start of the 2nd century AD and in use until at least the 3rd. It still hosts shows in summer.

Below the theatre are the Roman baths, and three arches of the frigidarium, the cold-water room, are still standing.

At the edge of the area, the temple began as an Etruscan building and was later rebuilt by the Romans. What you see today are its low stone foundations, with cypresses on the slope behind.

Fiesole’s Archaeological Museum and the Museo Bandini

The Archaeological Museum, open since 1914, sits beside the ruins and holds what was dug up in and around them. It’s a small museum, with Etruscan and Roman finds and others from the Lombards, who ruled here in the early Middle Ages.

The Museo Bandini, on your ticket from Friday to Sunday, shows the collection of Angelo Maria Bandini (1726–1803), a canon of the Church and the librarian of Florence’s Laurentian Library. It has been on show in its present home since 2006.

The Primo Conti Foundation at Villa Le Coste

The third Fiesole entry on the Firenze Card is the Primo Conti Foundation, at Via Duprè 18, in Villa Le Coste, a villa from the 15th century. It keeps about 60 paintings and 150 drawings by the painter Primo Conti, dated from 1911 to 1985. It has its own opening days, separate from the other three, so check them before you plan your visit around it.