Basilica of San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo in Florence: the basilica, the Medici Chapels and the library

San Lorenzo in Florence was the parish church of the Medici, the banking family who ruled the city, and it’s where Filippo Brunelleschi, one of the architects who started the Renaissance, laid out his rows of grey stone columns and round arches. Off the church is his Old Sacristy, a small square room that you see on the same ticket.

The name San Lorenzo covers more than the church, though. Three sites share the complex, and each has its own ticket. The basilica is run by its parish. The Medici Chapels, where Michelangelo built the New Sacristy, are a state museum, and the Laurentian Library, whose staircase he also designed, is a separate site again.

So if it’s Michelangelo’s tombs in the Medici Chapels you came for, the basilica ticket won’t get you in. If it’s Brunelleschi’s church, that’s the €9 one, and the rest of this page is mainly about it.

Basilica of San Lorenzo tickets: €9 at the door

The basilica ticket costs €9 and covers the whole basilica complex: the church itself, Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy, the cloisters, the treasury museum, the crypt and the monumental rooms underground.

You buy it at the ticket office when you arrive. The basilica’s own site sells it there and lists no online booking or time slots, so there’s no time slot to pick in advance and you can go in whenever you’re passing.

San Lorenzo with the Firenze Card

The basilica complex is one of the Firenze Card’s included sites, and San Lorenzo isn’t on the list of places where cardholders have to book, so you show the card and go in. The card costs €94 and runs for 72 hours from your first entry, with about 60 museums included once each. It’s sold through GetYourGuide.

At €9, San Lorenzo alone will never pay for the card, and even with the Medici Chapels you’re a long way from €94. The card starts to save money at five or six paid museums, so count San Lorenzo as one stop on a fuller list. None of Florence’s other passes covers the basilica: not the Uffizi Passepartout, the Pitti and Boboli pass or the Uffizi and Accademia combo. Our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes weighs all of them up.

San Lorenzo opening hours, Mondays included

The basilica opens for visits Monday to Saturday.

Monday is a good day for it. The Uffizi, the Accademia and the Bargello close on Mondays, and San Lorenzo opens at 10:00 as on any other weekday.

San Lorenzo is still a working church, with Mass on weekdays at 9:30 and 18:00, and special celebrations can change the visiting hours. The basilica posts those in its calendar, so it’s worth a look before you go if your date falls near a feast day.

Inside the Basilica of San Lorenzo: Brunelleschi’s nave and the Old Sacristy

The church you walk into replaced an older Romanesque one in the 15th century. Brunelleschi’s nave is all clear lines: grey stone columns, round arches and a flat coffered ceiling over the top.

The Old Sacristy is the room Brunelleschi built off the church, and Donatello, one of the great sculptors of the early Renaissance, decorated it. It’s a cube-shaped room under a ribbed dome, with round reliefs in the corners where the dome meets the walls.

From the church your ticket takes you out to the cloisters. The main one dates from 1462 and was built by Antonio Manetti, with a garden of box hedges and pomegranate trees in the middle.

Below ground are the crypt and the monumental underground rooms, and the treasury museum holds the basilica’s own collection. All of these come with the church, on the same ticket.

Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library and the Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo

Michelangelo’s two works at San Lorenzo are the ones the basilica ticket doesn’t reach. The Laurentian Library, the Medici family’s library, has its own ticket and its own door, at Piazza di San Lorenzo 9. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who later became Pope Clement VII, commissioned it from Michelangelo. Work started in 1525, Michelangelo left Florence in 1534, and others finished the vestibule after him.

The part to see is the vestibule and its staircase, built by Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1559 to Michelangelo’s design, and the reading room beyond it. The library opens in the mornings only, so plan San Lorenzo around it.

The library also runs guided visits on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, from 14:00 to 16:00, for groups of up to 25, booked by email.

The third site, the Medici Chapels, holds Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and the Cappella dei Principi, the chapel of the Medici grand dukes.