Medici Chapels

Medici Chapels tickets: a timed entry with the app, or a guided tour

You don’t have to book the Medici Chapels, because a set entry time is optional there. Our ticket gives you one, with the booking costs already in the price and an audio guide app of Florence on your phone: the Medici Chapels entry ticket, from €19. It has a reduced option too, with the same app.

If you’d rather have someone explain the tombs to you, we sell two guided visits. The small-group tour, from €52.90 for adults, comes with a headset to hear the guide, has a lower child price and can be cancelled up to 24 hours before your slot. The other, from €79 for adults, is sold as skip-the-line entry with a live guide and a headset.

None of them gets you into the Basilica of San Lorenzo next door or its library, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which have tickets of their own. The Stanza Segreta, the room known as Michelangelo’s Secret Room, is a separate circuit as well, with its own timed tickets, and it isn’t on any ticket we sell.

If you’re bringing children, under-18s go in free, as at all of Italy’s state museums.

When the Medici Chapels are free: first Sundays and 4 November

Because the Medici Chapels are a state museum, everyone goes in free on the first Sunday of every month, and on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November. On those days bookings are suspended, so there’s no time to reserve: you simply go on the day. The free themed visits the museum runs in Italian are off on those days too.

The Medici Chapels with the Firenze Card

The Firenze Card includes one entry to the Medici Chapels, as it does at each of its museums, and there’s nothing to book. Cardholders only have to reserve at a handful of places, among them the Uffizi, the Accademia and the Palazzo Vecchio, and the chapels aren’t one of them.

The card costs €94 and runs for 72 hours from your first entry, across about 60 museums. It starts to pay off from five or six paid museums, so with the chapels and one or two others it doesn’t. If your 72 hours take in a first Sunday, the card does nothing for you here that day, because the chapels are free for everyone.

The other passes we sell in Florence leave the chapels out: the Uffizi and Accademia combo, the Uffizi’s five-day Passepartout and the Pitti and Boboli pass. Our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes puts each one next to the others, and you can buy the card itself through GetYourGuide.

Medici Chapels opening hours: closed on Mondays, last entry at 18:10

The chapels keep the same hours all year, from Tuesday to Sunday, and the last entry is 40 minutes before closing.

Large backpacks and suitcases aren’t allowed inside, so leave them at your hotel before you come.

On four days a week, the museum’s staff lead a themed visit in Italian, with no booking and nothing to pay beyond your ticket. It runs on Tuesday and Thursday at 16:00 and 17:00 and on Friday and Sunday at 11:00 and 12:00, lasts about an hour, and the groups of ten are put together at the entrance. It doesn’t run on the free days.

Inside the Medici Chapels: the grand dukes’ crypt and the Cappella dei Principi

The visit starts underground, in the Medici crypt, where the grand dukes of Tuscany are buried, from Cosimo I to Gian Gastone. When Gian Gastone died in 1737, the Medici dynasty ended with him. Next to it is the Lorraine crypt, of the Habsburg-Lorraine family.

From there you go up into the Cappella dei Principi, the Chapel of the Princes: a Baroque mausoleum whose walls are covered in inlaid marble and hard stones, with the grand dukes’ sarcophagi around it. Its dome was painted by Pietro Benvenuti between 1828 and 1837, almost a century after the last Medici was laid in the crypt below.

Italy made the chapels a state museum in 1869 and declared them a national monument, for what the Medici tombs meant to a country that had only just been united.

Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and the Medici dukes’ tombs

The route ends in the Sagrestia Nuova, Michelangelo’s New Sacristy. Two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, commissioned it as a burial chapel for the family, and Michelangelo worked on it from 1519 to 1534. It began the year Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, died, and with him the legitimate line of his branch of the family.

Lorenzo’s tomb is the one in the photo at the top of this page: the duke seated in his niche, above the reclining figures of Dawn and Dusk. Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, has the other, with Night and Day. Alessandro, the first duke of Florence, was later laid in the Duke of Urbino’s sarcophagus as well.

The third tomb is for Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano de’ Medici. Above their inscription stands Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, between statues of Saints Cosmas and Damian.

The crypt, the chapel and the sacristy are on different levels, but the whole route is step-free from the street: a ramp at ground level, a lift up to the Cappella dei Principi and a platform lift to the New Sacristy, with an accessible toilet and the shop on the way out. Mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs are assessed case by case.

Finding the Medici Chapels entrance behind San Lorenzo

The entrance is at Piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini 6, on the square behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo. It isn’t the basilica’s own door, so if you arrive at the church front, walk round to the back.

Florence has no metro, and the chapels are in the old centre, so you’ll reach them on foot from wherever you’re staying in town.