Palazzo Strozzi

Palazzo Strozzi tickets: one exhibition, any day until 24 January 2027

At Palazzo Strozzi you don’t buy a ticket for the palace: you buy one for the exhibition on inside it. Until 24 January 2027 that’s Broken. The Power of the Fragment, laid out in the courtyard and on the piano nobile, the palace’s grand first floor. Our ticket costs €21 and has an open date, so it works on any day and at any time the exhibition is open.

You don’t have to book, since the ticket office in the courtyard sells tickets on the day. The palace still strongly recommends buying online, because it gives you direct access and less waiting. Our ticket goes on your phone, can’t be refunded, and leaves out the audio guide, which costs €4 at the ticket office, lasts about an hour and comes in Italian or English.

Groups of five or more are the exception: they have to book and pay in advance through the palace’s booking office, on +39 055 2645155, Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 18:00.

Children, families and under-30s have lower prices of their own, and Thursday evenings are the cheapest time of the week for anyone under 30.

Palazzo Strozzi is run by a foundation, not by the state, so two rules of Florence’s state museums don’t reach it: the free first Sunday of the month, and free entry up to the age of 17. We found no day when the exhibition is free for everyone.

Palazzo Strozzi on the Firenze Card: the exhibition is included

Foundation or not, Palazzo Strozzi is on the Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, which includes one entry to the exhibition here, as it does for each museum on it.

The card costs €94 for 72 hours and pays off once you see five or six paid museums with it. Here it saves you the €21 of our ticket, which helps, but the Strozzi alone won’t make the card worth it. For a family it adds less, since children aged 6 to 18 pay only €5 and the under-6s go in free anyway.

None of Florence’s other passes includes Palazzo Strozzi: the Uffizi PassePartout and the Duomo passes both leave it out. Our page on Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them side by side, and the Firenze Card is sold through GetYourGuide.

Since the card covers whatever show is running, its value here lasts only while there’s an exhibition on. Broken closes on 24 January 2027, so after that check what the palace is showing before you count it.

Palazzo Strozzi opening hours: every day, and Thursdays until 23:00

Palazzo Strozzi opens seven days a week, Mondays included, which is handy on the day so many of Florence’s museums are shut. The exhibition is open from 10:00 to 20:00, with last entry at 19:00, and the ticket office in the courtyard sells from 10:00 to 19:00.

Thursday is the long day, open until 23:00 with last entry at 22:00, three hours later than the rest of the week, and from 18:00 it’s also when under-30s go in for €5. The ticket office closes at 19:00 on Thursdays too, so if you’re coming late with an open-dated ticket on your phone you can walk straight in until 22:00.

Whichever door you use, only small bags go into the rooms. Backpacks and anything over 35 × 30 × 10 cm go in the free cloakroom, in lockers with a combination lock, which are emptied at the end of the day. Anything left behind is kept at the ticket office for 30 days.

Inside, you can take photos with a phone or a non-professional camera, but without flash, tripods or selfie sticks. Food and drink stay outside the rooms, and only assistance animals come in.

Broken. The Power of the Fragment: what’s in the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi

Broken is about the force of the fragment in the history of sculpture: the statue missing its arms, the head without a body, the piece that turned up on its own. It runs from antiquity to contemporary art, with more than 80 works by artists from Michelangelo and Rodin to Louise Bourgeois and Francesco Vezzoli.

The loans come from a long way off. Works have travelled from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. The show was organised with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where a new version runs from 3 March to 27 June 2027, in case you miss it in Florence.

The audio guide alone takes about an hour, so give the visit at least that. The route ends in the Marsilio Arte bookshop, and there’s free Wi-Fi.

Filippo Strozzi’s palace, begun at dawn on 6 August 1489

The palace you walk into is a homecoming. Filippo Strozzi the Elder, a Florentine merchant, came back to the city in 1466 after 25 years in exile imposed by the Medici, Florence’s ruling family, and he built the palace as a sign that the Strozzi were back. He bought the land piece by piece at what’s now the corner of Via Tornabuoni and Via Strozzi, and work began on 6 August 1489, at dawn and under the sign of Leo.

He didn’t see it finished. When Filippo died in 1491, the south facade and half of the great cornice along the roof were still to be built. The architects named in the record are Giuliano da Sangallo and Simone del Pollaiolo, known as il Cronaca, and every stage of the work was written down in the Libri della muraglia, the building’s account books. What they made reworks the model of the Medici family’s own palace: a symmetrical plan, rusticated stone walls graded floor by floor, big paired windows and the colonnaded courtyard you walk into from Piazza Strozzi.

In 1538 the palace passed to branches of the family tied to the Medici. It changed hands again in 1937, when Italy’s national insurance institute, the INA, bought it, and in 1940 it was restored and reopened with an exhibition of 16th-century Tuscan art. That show is why you come here for exhibitions today: it made Palazzo Strozzi Florence’s main exhibition venue, and two cultural institutes, the Gabinetto Vieusseux and the Institute of Renaissance Studies, have been based in the palace ever since.

Getting to Palazzo Strozzi from Santa Maria Novella station

If you arrive in Florence by train, you’re already close: Palazzo Strozzi is a 6-minute walk from Santa Maria Novella station, and the entrance is through the courtyard on Piazza Strozzi.