Museo Galileo

Museo Galileo tickets: €14, nothing to book and no time slot

The Museo Galileo keeps the only two telescopes of Galileo’s that survive, and you can walk in to see them without booking anything. Individual visitors buy a ticket at the desk or from the museum’s own online ticket office, and either way there’s no time slot. The ticket is good for the whole day, so if you step out for lunch you can come back in. We don’t sell this one, so these are the museum’s own prices for 2026.

Buying online adds €1 per ticket, and moving an online ticket to another date costs €0.50. A ticket bought at the desk is only valid on the day it’s issued. Whichever way you buy, the museum doesn’t take tickets back: it excludes the right to cancel that normally comes with buying online.

A ticket for Santa Croce, the church where Galileo is buried, saves you money here. Show one for the Santa Croce complex from this year at the desk and you pay the reduced €10, though it doesn’t combine with other discounts.

What you won’t find here is a free first Sunday. The museum is private, run by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, so it stays out of the free Sundays of Italy’s state museums and of Florence’s city museums alike.

The Museo Galileo with the Firenze Card: included, and open on Mondays

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card at €94 for 72 hours from your first entry, includes the Museo Galileo, one visit like every museum on it. The museum isn’t on the card’s list of places you have to book, and individual visitors don’t book here either.

Monday is the best day to use the card here. Florence’s big state museums close that day, while the Galileo stays open from 9:30 to 18:00, so a card you start on a Friday can finish here. Tuesday is the other way round: the doors close at 13:00.

At €14 it’s one of the mid-priced entries that help the card earn back what it costs. The card starts to pay off from five or six paid museums, and with only the Uffizi and the Accademia it loses.

Under-18s in the cardholder’s family go in with the card; otherwise 6 to 18-year-olds pay €7 here. Florence’s other passes, the Uffizi’s PassePartout and the Duomo passes, don’t include the Galileo, and Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them side by side.

Galileo’s telescopes and the Medici instruments: what you see in the Museo Galileo

The museum fills two floors of Palazzo Castellani, the old palace on the Arno beside the Uffizi. On the first, nine rooms hold the Medici collections, from the 15th to the 18th century, and on the second, nine more hold those of the Lorraine dynasty, who ruled Tuscany after the Medici, through the 18th and 19th centuries.

The two telescopes are long wooden tubes, mounted one above the other in their case. Near them is the framed objective lens from the telescope Galileo used to discover the moons of Jupiter. The museum has the lens, not the whole instrument it came from.

From there the collections spread out into painted globes, clocks and barometers, and a giant armillary sphere, a model of the heavens built from rings, by Antonio Santucci. There are instruments from the Accademia del Cimento, the Florentine academy of experiments, and upstairs the Lorraine rooms move on to machines for electricity. There’s also an interactive area where you can try historic instruments.

Visitors have complained that the labels beside the objects explain little, so the free app is worth having. It covers about 80 instruments and needs headphones and an internet connection, and the museum has free wifi. A visit takes one to two hours. It’s a museum of historic instruments rather than a hands-on science centre, and the museum itself says children under 7 or 8 may find it hard going.

Galileo’s finger at the Museo Galileo, and the relics that came back in 2009

One case holds something you don’t expect in a museum of instruments: the middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, standing in a gilded glass egg. It was taken in 1737, when his body was moved to a tomb in Santa Croce, along with other fingers, a tooth and a vertebra.

Those other relics had a stranger road. A thumb, an index finger and the tooth went missing in 1905 and turned up at an auction in 2009, more than a century later, and they were handed to the museum. The vertebra is in Padua.

How the Medici instruments reached the Museo Galileo in Palazzo Castellani

Galileo’s link to this collection goes back to the family who gathered it. Cosimo I and later Medici collected instruments from 1562, and in 1610 they invited Galileo to their court. The Lorraine grand dukes kept collecting, and in 1925 the Medici and Lorraine collections passed to the university and then to the museum.

The museum has been in Palazzo Castellani since 1930. The building dates back to the end of the 11th century, and in Dante’s time it was called the Castello d’Altafronte. From 1574 to 1841 it was the seat of the Giudici di Ruota, a court of magistrates, and the square outside is still Piazza dei Giudici, the judges’ square.

Museo Galileo opening hours: Mondays open, Tuesdays only until 13:00

If you’re choosing a season, the museum recommends autumn or winter. In March and April it fills with school groups, and in summer with tourists, so autumn and winter are the quieter months.

Getting to the Museo Galileo from the Uffizi

Florence has no metro, and you won’t need one: the museum is in the historic centre at Piazza dei Giudici 1, by the Arno and right next to the Uffizi. Walk round from the Uffizi to the river and look down at the door, where a sundial is set into the paving.

If you’re driving, the centre is a ZTL, a limited traffic zone, so leave the car outside it. The nearest car park the museum suggests is Sant’Ambrogio, at Piazza Annigoni 9, and from there you walk in.

Blind visitors have tactile maps, a 3D model of the palace, a tactile audio guide and braille guides. Tactile visits cost €3 and are booked on 055 2653174, and for deaf visitors there are videos in Italian Sign Language.