Museo di San Marco

Museo di San Marco tickets: entry with an audio guide, and who goes in free

You don’t have to book the Museo di San Marco, so it’s a museum you can fit in once you know which morning you have. The ticket we sell, at €16, covers entry and the exhibition and adds a digital audio guide of Florence on your phone. It can’t be refunded or cancelled, so buy it once the day is settled.

Under-18s go in free, as they do at Florence’s other state museums. On our ticket the child option, at €5, is what the audio guide costs them. EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay €2 with ID, and our ticket has a reduced option for them too, with the audio guide.

Museo di San Marco opening hours: mornings only, Tuesday to Sunday

Free day or paid, San Marco is a morning museum. It opens at 8:30 from Tuesday to Sunday, the last entry is at 12:45 and the doors close at 13:50, with no afternoon opening at all.

The time that matters even more is 13:30, when the upper floor with Fra Angelico’s cells closes. Walk in at 12:30 and the whole visit has to fit into an hour upstairs and twenty minutes downstairs. We’d go at opening, or by 10:00 at the latest, and head upstairs first.

If you use a wheelchair, check before you go. The museum has wheelchair access, but its ticket office warns that the lift is temporarily out of order, so visitors with reduced mobility can’t get to the upper floor and its cells. No date has been given for the repair.

The Museo di San Marco with the Firenze Card: included, nothing to book

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes San Marco, and this is one of the museums where you don’t book anything: you show the card at the entrance and go in. The card costs €94, runs for 72 hours from your first entry and covers around 60 museums, once each.

On its own, San Marco won’t make the card pay, and neither will the Uffizi and the Accademia together. It starts to come out ahead from five or six paid museums, and then San Marco is an easy morning to slot in, as long as your 72 hours include one that isn’t a Monday.

The Uffizi’s Passepartout doesn’t cover San Marco. To see how the cards compare across your own list, look at Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes, or buy the Firenze Card directly. Guided visits aren’t covered by any card.

Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the friars’ cells at San Marco

The cells are why that 13:30 matters. Fra Angelico worked in this convent from 1438 to 1445, and in those years he painted the rooms where the friars slept, up on the museum’s top floor.

That’s what makes San Marco different from a gallery. You see his paintings in the rooms they were made for, in the building he lived and worked in, and the convent keeps the largest collection of his work anywhere in the world.

Fra Angelico’s altarpieces in the Sala del Beato Angelico

Downstairs, the route starts in the cloister of Sant’Antonino and leads into the Sala dell’Ospizio, the convent’s old hospice room. It’s now named after the painter, the Sala del Beato (“Blessed”) Angelico, and it holds the other half of the collection, his panel paintings.

Look for the Annunciation, the Deposition, the Triptych of St Peter Martyr, the Annalena Altarpiece, the Last Judgement, the San Marco Altarpiece and the Linaioli Tabernacle, painted for Florence’s guild of linen merchants.

The route goes on through the refectory and the chapter house, and Angelico isn’t the only painter you’ll see. There’s a Last Supper by Ghirlandaio, a Madonna and Child by Paolo Uccello, terracottas by the Della Robbia family and works by Fra Bartolomeo, among them his portrait of Savonarola, the Dominican preacher who was a friar at San Marco.

Michelozzo’s library at the Museo di San Marco

Michelozzo, the architect who built the convent, also designed its library, a long hall divided by two rows of slim columns. It was the first library of the Renaissance open to the public, and the philosophers Ficino and Pico della Mirandola studied in it.

How the convent of San Marco became a museum

All of it was paid for by Cosimo de’ Medici, head of the Medici banking family, and Michelozzo built the convent between 1437 and 1443. Fra Angelico was painting the walls while the building was going up.

In 1869 the convent was declared a national monument and part of it became a museum, and Angelico’s panel paintings, scattered until then, were brought together here in the 1920s. The museum takes up only the monumental part of the convent. Friars still live in parts of the cloister of San Domenico, and the church of San Marco next door is separate from the museum.

Walking to the Museo di San Marco from the Accademia and the Duomo

The entrance is at Piazza San Marco 3, a short walk north of the Duomo and very close to the Accademia Gallery, where Michelangelo’s David stands. The two make an easy morning together, as long as San Marco comes first and you’re upstairs well before 13:30.