Opificio delle Pietre Dure

Opificio delle Pietre Dure tickets: €6, sold by the museum

A ticket to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure costs €6, and it isn’t one we sell. You buy it from CoopCulture, the official online ticket office, from B-Ticket, the booking service of the Uffizi museums, or from the ticket office at the museum.

We found no booking requirement for individual visitors, so you can buy on the day. Groups are different: with six people or more, you book and pay ahead for a set date and time.

Two old figures still go round online. Many guides give the price as €4, and one says a Uffizi ticket gets you in free. The €6 price is the one the city’s tourist office and the official ticket office give now, and we found no official source for free entry with a Uffizi ticket.

Opificio delle Pietre Dure opening hours: mornings, and three Thursdays until 18:00

What you do have to plan around is the clock, because the Opificio is a morning museum. It opens Monday to Saturday from 8:15 to 14:00, the ticket office stops selling at 13:30, and it’s closed on Sundays, public holidays and 24 June.

The exceptions are three Thursdays this autumn: on 5, 12 and 19 November the museum stays open until 18:00, with last entry at 17:30, at the normal ticket price. After 19 November it goes back to mornings only, and we haven’t seen the calendar for 2027 yet.

Because it never opens on a Sunday, the state museums’ free first Sunday doesn’t apply to the Opificio. A visitor in March 2026 found it very quiet, so you probably don’t need to be at the door at 8:15. Just leave yourself time before the 13:30 last entry.

The Opificio delle Pietre Dure with the Firenze Card

The Firenze Card counts the Opificio as one of its included entries, once, like every museum on the card. The card makes you book some museums, such as the Uffizi, the Accademia and the Palazzo Vecchio, but the Opificio isn’t on that list.

At €6, though, it’s a small part of what the card costs. The Firenze Card starts to pay off from five or six paid museums, so the Opificio is one to add to a card day built around the bigger ones, such as the Uffizi and the Accademia. On its own, the ticket is the cheaper way in. You buy the card through GetYourGuide.

The Uffizi Passepartout doesn’t include it, and no pass covers guided visits or group entry. Our page on Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them side by side.

Inside the Opificio: stone pictures, tables and the craftsmen’s tools

What fills the rooms is pietre dure, Italian for “hard stones”, and the technique the Florentines called commesso. Stones of different colours are cut so they fit against each other and form a picture, with no paint. The sky, the water and a town’s walls are each separate pieces.

Around the panels are tables, cabinets and work in two other techniques: painted stone, and scagliola, made with a very light plaster. Look out for the pieces connected to the monumental altar of the Chapel of the Princes, the Medici chapel at San Lorenzo. The altar was never finished.

Then the museum shows how it was all done. There are samples of the stones, the workbenches and the tools, and the pieces make more sense once you’ve seen what cut them. It’s a small museum: one guide gives it about an hour and a half, and a visitor in March 2026 found half an hour enough.

How the Medici workshop became the Opificio delle Pietre Dure museum

The workshop came first. Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, founded it in 1588 as his court’s pietre dure workshop, and set it up to make the lining of marble and semi-precious stones for that same Chapel of the Princes. You see the chapel itself on a separate Medici Chapels ticket.

The museum opened in 1882 as a branch of the workshop, to show what it had made. The workshop never stopped: today the Opificio is a public institute of Italy’s culture ministry, known for restoration and one of the country’s two state schools of conservation, and it still restores mosaics of semi-precious stone.

Getting into the Opificio on Via degli Alfani

The museum is at Via degli Alfani 78. Florence has no metro, so you come on foot or by city bus, and the main entrance is level with the pavement.

Inside, lifting platforms deal with the changes of level: the one step up to the ticket desk, the bookshop and the toilets, the museum’s entrance and exit, and one of the rooms. The accessible toilets are on the ground floor. The upper floor is the part to check if you use an electric wheelchair, because you reach it by a stair lift that isn’t suitable for one.