Palazzo Medici Riccardi

Palazzo Medici Riccardi tickets, and the winter price from 2 November

Palazzo Medici Riccardi is where the Medici lived, and its famous room is a small one on the first floor: the Magi Chapel, where the painter Benozzo Gozzoli showed the family riding in the procession of the Three Kings. The ticket covers the chapel, the Gallery of Mirrors the Riccardi added later, the rest of the palace and whatever exhibitions are on. There’s no ticket for the museum alone or for an exhibition alone.

We don’t sell this one. The museum sells its own tickets, online for a chosen day and time, or at the ticket office for today, and the price changes with the season: since Monday 2 November the winter price has applied.

Booking ahead isn’t compulsory, though the museum strongly recommends it. An online ticket is valid only for the day and time you pick, can’t be changed or refunded, and the museum asks you to be on time. You can buy up to 10 tickets at once, and tickets for today aren’t sold online at all: for those you go to the desk.

If you’ve read that the palace is free on the first Sunday of the month, that’s for residents of the Metropolitan City of Florence only. Everyone else pays the usual price that day, and there’s no online sale. Free entry on any day covers under-18s, licensed guides, accredited journalists, visitors with disabilities and the person with them, and members of ICOM, ICOMOS and ICCROM.

Palazzo Medici Riccardi with the Firenze Card

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes Palazzo Medici Riccardi as one entry within its 72 hours. That saves you the €10 winter ticket, or €15 from 1 March, and the €1.50 online fee on top.

Booking with the card is where the sources disagree. The museum says that since 9 April 2026 booking is optional for individuals and groups of under eight, compulsory from eight people up, and always free, in the Firenze Card app. Some of the card’s own pages still list the palace among the museums you must book. So we’d book the free slot anyway, and if you book, book the children with you too, since the card asks for that.

No other pass covers the palace: the Uffizi and Accademia combo, the Uffizi PassePartout and the Pitti and Boboli pass all leave it out. The card pays for itself once you visit five or six paid museums, so if your list is only the Uffizi and the Accademia, single tickets cost less. With the palace and two or three more on it as well, the Firenze Card starts to make sense, and our Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes page compares them all.

Palazzo Medici Riccardi opening hours: every day except Wednesday

The palace opens at the same time all year: from 9:00 to 19:00 every day except Wednesday, when it’s closed. The ticket office shuts an hour before the museum, at the last entry at 18:00.

The shop keeps shorter hours, from 9:00 to 18:00, and closes on Wednesdays as well. Besides Wednesdays, the palace closes on 25 December.

All the rooms are fully accessible except the chapel, where a platform takes wheelchairs up to 70 cm wide and 250 kg, and you can borrow a wheelchair at the information desk.

The Magi Chapel: Gozzoli’s procession, with the Medici among the riders

Gozzoli began the frescoes in 1459, and the procession of the Three Kings runs round three walls, one king to each: Gaspar in a white tunic on the east wall, Balthazar in green on the south, Melchior in red on the west.

Look closely at the riders, because the Medici put themselves in the parade. Cosimo il Vecchio, who built the palace, is there with Piero de’ Medici, and so are the young Lorenzo and Giuliano, along with Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Sigismondo Malatesta and Pope Pius II.

You see all this in five minutes. The chapel takes groups of 10 people every five minutes, so you may wait your turn in the courtyard, and when you’re in, look round the walls in king order.

The Gallery of Mirrors and the rest of the palace

The other room people come for belongs to the second family in the palace’s name. The Riccardi had the Galleria degli Specchi, the Gallery of Mirrors, built in Baroque taste, and Luca Giordano painted its vault between 1682 and 1685.

The same ticket takes you down to the Archaeological Route and into the Marble Museum, and through this autumn’s two exhibitions: “Oltre il Rinascimento”, until 5 January 2027, and “San Francesco d’Assisi e Giuseppe Nicola Nasini”, until 31 January 2027. The building is still a working one: the Metropolitan City of Florence, the Prefettura and two libraries, the Moreniana and the Riccardiana, all have their home here.

How the Medici palace became Palazzo Medici Riccardi

The building starts with Cosimo il Vecchio, who commissioned it from the architect Michelozzo in 1444, on what was then the Via Larga and is now Via Cavour. Brunelleschi, the architect of Florence’s cathedral dome, had offered a design too, and Cosimo turned it down: according to Vasari, writing in 1568, it was too sumptuous. Michelozzo’s palace went on to serve as a model for others in the city, the Pitti and the Strozzi among them.

In 1494 the Medici were driven out of Florence, and the palace and everything in it were confiscated, Donatello’s bronze David and his Judith and Holofernes included. The family came back in 1512, but in 1540 Cosimo I moved the court to the Palazzo della Signoria, and the house on Via Larga stopped being where the family ruled from.

That’s how the second name came in. In 1659 the marquis Gabriello Riccardi bought the palace for 40,000 scudi and remodelled it in Baroque taste, which is where the Gallery of Mirrors comes from. The State bought it in 1810, and since 1874 it has belonged to the Province of Florence, now the Metropolitan City, which is why offices still share the building with the museum.

Getting to Palazzo Medici Riccardi from Santa Maria Novella and the Duomo

Florence has no metro, and you won’t need one here. From Santa Maria Novella, the main railway station, it’s a 10-minute walk, and the palace stands close to Piazza del Duomo, on Via Cavour.