Museo degli Innocenti

Museo degli Innocenti tickets: €9 at the museum, €6 with your Accademia ticket

We don’t sell a ticket for the Museo degli Innocenti. You buy entry from the museum itself, at the ticket desk on the floor below ground or through the booking form on its site, and a full ticket costs €9.

The form only asks for your name, email, date and number of tickets, and nothing we’ve read says booking is required. Reductions are only given at the desk, though, so if one of the prices below is yours, buy it there. Guided tours of the collection are different: those have to be booked 15 days ahead.

The €6 price is the one to keep in mind if you’re seeing Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery on the same day: show that day’s Accademia ticket at the desk. The first Sunday works the other way. Florence’s state museums are free that day, but the Innocenti isn’t a state museum, so it stays open and charges the normal €9, and €7 for teenagers.

Until 4 April 2027 the building also hosts the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi a Firenze, on a ticket of its own. We couldn’t confirm what it costs, or whether the museum ticket or the Firenze Card covers it, so check that before you plan around it.

The Museo degli Innocenti with the Firenze Card: entry included

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes the Museo degli Innocenti, and the museum lists cardholders among the visitors who don’t pay. It isn’t one of the places where the card makes you book a time, so as far as we can tell you show it at the ticket desk and walk in. Under-18s in a cardholder’s family go in with it too, and under-11s are free here anyway.

Here the card saves you the €9 ticket. It costs €94 for 72 hours from your first entry, with about 60 museums once each, and it starts paying for itself at around four of the big paid museums, so we’d treat the Innocenti as a good stop on a card day rather than a reason to buy one. You can buy the Firenze Card online.

Of Florence’s other passes, the Uffizi’s five-day PassePartout and the Duomo passes don’t cover it, because the museum belongs to the Istituto degli Innocenti and sits outside the state circuit. Our Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes page sets them side by side.

Museo degli Innocenti opening hours, the cloakroom and the way in

The museum is open every day, Mondays included, and keeps the same hours all winter apart from a few days around Christmas.

You may find older listings online that say it closes on Tuesdays or opens at 11:00 or 10:00. Those hours are out of date, and the museum’s own times are the ones above.

How babies came to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, from 1445 to 1875

In 1419 the Arte della Seta, Florence’s silk guild, took on the job of building a hospital for abandoned children. The money came from a legacy of a thousand florins left by Francesco Datini, a merchant from Prato, and the design came from Brunelleschi, who was also building the cathedral’s dome at the time.

The hospital opened on 5 February 1445, the day its first baby arrived, a girl named Agata Smeralda after the saint of the day. From then on, babies were left anonymously in a basin under the loggia, and later through a grated window, which you can still see by the entrance. That window closed on 30 June 1875, and with it the anonymous system came to an end. The children raised here were called nocentini, and Nocentini is still a common surname in Florence.

Life inside wasn’t only about survival. Between 1552 and 1580 the prior, Vincenzo Borghini, brought in music, painting and the abacus, and the girls learned to read, sew and weave. The institution has never closed, either: it became a public charity in 1890, and the Istituto degli Innocenti still takes in children and mothers in difficulty today.

Inside the Museo degli Innocenti: Brunelleschi’s loggia, the babies’ tokens and the picture gallery

The museum is laid out in three routes: history, architecture and art. The architecture starts before you go in, with Brunelleschi’s loggia on the square and the glazed terracotta roundels along its front, each one a baby wrapped in swaddling bands.

Inside, you walk through the hospital’s monumental courtyards, with a view into its historic archive. The history route follows the hospital up to the 20th century, and among the things on show are the small objects that were left with the babies to identify them.

Upstairs, above the loggia, the Pinacoteca hangs art from the 14th to the 17th century. The painting to look for is Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi of 1488–89. Around it are a Madonna and Child with an Angel that Botticelli painted around 1465, Piero di Cosimo’s enthroned Madonna of 1493, and two glazed terracottas: Luca della Robbia’s Madonna and Child, from around 1445–50, and Andrea della Robbia’s swaddled babies of 1487.

Look out, too, for the Coretto, the small loft where the hospital’s wet nurses prayed. The museum has also announced a Galleria degli Affreschi for sinopias, the drawings found under frescoes, and for frescoes taken off their walls and brought here in 1971 after the 1966 flood, though we couldn’t confirm it has opened.

When you’ve finished, go up to the top floor. The Caffè del Verone sits in the building’s historic loggia up there, and it’s open to everyone, so you can also come back for a coffee another day without a museum ticket.

Getting to the Museo degli Innocenti on Piazza della Santissima Annunziata

The museum is a short walk from the Duomo, on Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, the square with an equestrian statue in the middle and Brunelleschi’s loggia along one side. From Santa Maria Novella station it’s about 15 minutes on foot, and from Campo di Marte station about 20.

If you’d rather ride, tram T2, which runs from Santa Maria Novella and the airport, stops at San Marco, and the buses stop at Colonna Museo Archeologico and Santissima Annunziata. Leave the car behind: the square is inside zone B of the ZTL, Florence’s limited-traffic zone, and cars can’t get in.