Synagogue and Jewish Museum of Florence

Florence synagogue tickets, and who pays less

The Florence synagogue is the green copper dome you see over the city’s rooftops, and inside, its walls are painted with arabesques picked out in gold, all the way up to that dome. One ticket covers the prayer hall on the ground floor and the Jewish Museum on the two floors above it, so it’s a single visit through a single door, at Via Farini 6.

Our ticket costs €13, with the booking costs included, and it covers the synagogue, the museum and whatever temporary exhibition is on. Individual visitors don’t have to book a time. Groups are asked to.

The synagogue belongs to Florence’s Jewish Community, which runs it with Opera Laboratori, so it isn’t one of the state museums, and the free first Sunday at the state museums doesn’t apply here.

The museum also runs guided tours in Italian on some Sundays, at €10 a person, for up to 30 people. They have to be booked by phone, on +39 055 2989879, any day from 9:00 to 18:00. The last series it announced ran until April 2026, so ring to ask whether one falls during your stay.

The Florence synagogue on the Firenze Card: walk in, no booking

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, gets you into about 60 museums once each over 72 hours, and the synagogue is one of its included entries. Here it’s also one of the simplest to use: no booking and no phone call. You show the card at the ticket desk and go in on the next visit slot available, and under-18s in the cardholder’s family come in with you.

The entry the card covers here is worth €13, so the synagogue won’t be what makes the card pay for itself. That takes four or more of the big paid museums, and with the Uffizi and the Accademia alone the card loses money. It’s a cheap stop to fit in between the bigger museums on a card day. Because the 72 hours run without a break, keep it off Saturday, when it’s closed, and off Friday afternoon, when it shuts at 15:00 in the cooler months.

The Uffizi Passepartout and the Duomo’s passes don’t include it, and our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes sets them all side by side. The card itself is sold through GetYourGuide.

Florence synagogue opening hours, the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays

The synagogue keeps two timetables, summer and winter, and both are built around the Sabbath: open on Sundays, short on Fridays, closed on Saturdays. The ticket desk closes 45 minutes before the doors do.

The museum publishes its holiday closures for the year, and the 2026 list ended with Simchat Torah on 3 and 4 October. Between now and the end of the year, the only closure is 25 December. The 2027 dates aren’t out yet, so if you’re coming in spring or early autumn, when the big holidays fall, check the museum’s calendar before you plan around it.

Services are a separate matter from the tourist visit. To attend one, you ask for permission at least a week ahead, through a form on the Jewish Community’s site.

Inside the Florence synagogue: the painted prayer hall under the dome

From the street you go in through a cast-iron gate into a garden, with the building in front of you: a facade of white travertine and pink stone, and the dome above it. The style is called Moorish, though it blends Moorish, Romanesque and Byzantine elements, and Lonely Planet compares the building to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

The prayer hall is the ground floor. Up close, the gold arabesques share the walls with geometric patterns, and the great dome they lead to sits over the point where the arms of the hall cross. Light comes in through stained glass in several colours, and the floor is laid in marble mosaic.

Upstairs in the Jewish Museum of Florence: ghetto silver and family rites

Stairs and a lift take you up to the museum. The first-floor room tells the story of Florence’s Jews through ceremonial textiles and silver from the late 16th to the 19th century. Many of the pieces come from the two synagogues of the old ghetto, the Italian and the Spanish or Levantine, along with ornaments for the Sefer Torah, the handwritten scroll of the five books of Moses.

The second floor moves from the synagogue to the home, with objects for the rites of family life: birth, marriage and a child’s coming of age in the faith. From this floor you also get a view down into the prayer hall.

How Florence’s synagogue was built, and how it survived 1944

The silver upstairs comes from a ghetto set up in 1571, where Florence’s Jews lived with their two synagogues. In 1848 Tuscany granted them civil equality, and in 1861 full citizenship came with the new kingdom of Italy. The ghetto itself was demolished in the 1890s, which is why its synagogues survive only as the objects in the museum.

David Levi, a cavaliere, roughly the Italian equivalent of a knight, left his estate for “a monumental temple worthy of the city”. Marco Treves designed it with Mariano Falcini and Vincenzo Micheli, and it was inaugurated in 1882. It’s one of the largest synagogues in Southern Europe, and among the most important built in the years after emancipation.

In August 1944, German troops pulling out of Florence, with Italian fascists, laid explosives in the building. The Italian resistance defused most of them, and the damage was limited. It was restored after the war and again after the Arno flood of 1966. Today the community has about 1,400 members, and the synagogue follows the Sephardic, Orthodox rite.

Finding the Florence synagogue entrance on Via Farini

Some maps put the synagogue at number 4, but the door you want is number 6, in the Mattonaia district, where the museum and the ticket desk are. If you arrive with the Firenze Card, that’s also the desk where you show it. Inside, the synagogue and the first floor are fully accessible and the second floor partly, with a lift and an adapted toilet.