Palazzo Vecchio

Palazzo Vecchio tickets: the museum, the Arnolfo Tower and the Secret Passages

Palazzo Vecchio sells its museum and the Arnolfo Tower as two separate tickets, and the tower is the one with a set time: you pick your slot as you buy, and you’re asked to be there 15 minutes before it. Our museum ticket, at €30.50, covers the palace and its museum with a video guide or an audio guide, at the same price whichever you choose. It leaves the tower out.

To climb the tower as well, the ticket with the tower, at €50, puts the palace, the museum, the tower and an audio guide on one booking. You can cancel it up to 24 hours before your time slot.

The third ticket is a different kind of visit. Palazzo Vecchio with the Secret Passages, at €59, is a guided tour in English with skip-the-line entry and access to the Secret Passages, which the other two tickets don’t list. Infants go free on it, children have their own price, and you can cancel it up to 24 hours before the tour starts.

Under-18s of any nationality go into the museum free. On our tickets they still have a child option, €8 on the museum ticket, and it comes with the guide. Visitors aged 18 to 25 and university students pay a reduced price, and the museum ticket and the one with the tower both have a reduced option at checkout.

Prices went up on 1 February 2026, so guides written before then quote lower ones. The €10 you may also see is the Card del Fiorentino, a year card for residents of the Florence metropolitan area, and the free first Sunday of the month is for those residents too.

Palazzo Vecchio opening hours: the earlier tower and the short Thursday

The palace has no weekly closing day, but Thursday is a short one: the museum and the tower both close at 14:00. On the other six days the museum stays open until 19:00 and the tower until 17:00, and tickets stop an hour before closing.

That two-hour gap is the reason to see the tower first. Book it for the morning or early afternoon, then go round the museum, whose rooms stay open longer. On a Thursday, fit both into the morning.

Palazzo Vecchio with the Firenze Card: included, with a free booking

Palazzo Vecchio is included in the Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, which costs €94 and runs for 72 hours from your first entry. The museum and the Arnolfo Tower both have to be booked, which costs nothing, and you do it online before you go. Turn up without a booking and the card doesn’t get you in.

No card covers the Secret Passages or the guided tours, and the Uffizi passepartout doesn’t include the palace at all. The Uffizi and Accademia combo gives you a discount here instead of an entry.

The Firenze Card starts paying off at about four of the big paid museums, so with the Uffizi, the Accademia and the palace alone you’d spend more on the card than on the tickets. Fill a full three days and it changes: the Firenze Card lets you add the tower and Florence’s other museums without buying each ticket, and Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them side by side.

Inside Palazzo Vecchio: the Salone dei Cinquecento and the Studiolo

The Salone dei Cinquecento, on the first floor, is the hall to head for. Simone del Pollaiolo, known as il Cronaca, built it at the end of the 15th century at the urging of Savonarola, who was later executed as a heretic in the square outside. Back then the room was about 7 metres lower.

Leonardo and Michelangelo were both hired to paint battle scenes on its walls, the Battle of Anghiari and the Battle of Cascina, and neither finished. What covers the walls today are the frescoes painted between 1567 and 1571 under Giorgio Vasari, the painter and architect, with episodes from Florence’s wars against Pisa and Siena.

On the same floor is the Sala dei Duecento, the council chamber, with a wooden ceiling made by Giuliano da Maiano in the 1470s.

Off the great hall is the Studiolo of Francesco I, made between 1570 and 1575 by Vasari and Borghini as a study for rare and precious things. It’s a small room with no windows, painted panels on every wall and bronze statuettes in the niches.

Beyond it are the apartments of Pope Leo X, with rooms named after Cosimo il Vecchio and Lorenzo il Magnifico, and the Mezzanino. Up on the second floor you walk through the Quartiere degli Elementi, the Quartiere di Eleonora, the Priors’ rooms and the Sala delle Carte Geografiche, the room of maps.

Climbing the Arnolfo Tower to the Alberghetto cells

The tower rises 95 metres over the square, and you climb it on foot, more than 200 steps with no lift, so it’s not for anyone who finds stairs hard. Partway up are the cells called the Alberghetto, the “little hotel”. Cosimo il Vecchio was held there in 1433, and in 1498 Savonarola waited in one before his execution in the square below.

It’s called the Arnolfo Tower after Arnolfo di Cambio, the master builder the palace is credited to, though the museum itself says only that he perhaps designed it.

Palazzo Vecchio, from the medieval governors’ palace to Florence’s town hall

Building started in 1299, on top of the Roman theatre of Florentia, the Roman town that became Florence. The theatre went up in the late 1st or early 2nd century AD and stayed in use until the 5th. The excavators reckon it seated 8,000 to 10,000 people, facing the space that’s now Piazza della Signoria.

In 1540 Cosimo I, then duke of Florence, moved his home into the palace, and Vasari remodelled it for him. That’s when most of the rooms you walk through took the shape they have now.

Three centuries later, in 1872, the city council moved back into the Sala dei Duecento, and it still meets there: you’re walking through Florence’s working town hall.

The theatre’s remains were fully excavated by 2010, and the city has offered weekend guided visits down to them for small groups. Its own pages disagree on whether those visits are running now, so don’t build your day around them.

Getting to Palazzo Vecchio on Piazza della Signoria

Florence has no metro, and here you won’t miss it. Palazzo Vecchio stands on Piazza della Signoria, in the pedestrian centre, so you walk to it from the Duomo, the Uffizi or the Ponte Vecchio.

Inside, the palace runs a programme called Palazzo Vecchio inclusivo, with content for deaf and blind visitors.