Zeffirelli Museum

Zeffirelli Museum tickets: €12 at the museum, less for families

The Zeffirelli Museum keeps the stage world of Franco Zeffirelli, the Florence-born director of operas, plays and films: about 300 set sketches, costumes and models from 70 years of work, and his own studio, rebuilt in room 13. The museum sells its tickets itself, at the ticket desk and on its website, and it doesn’t ask you to book a time.

A full ticket costs €12, and families, over-65s and young children pay less.

Before paying the full price, check your wallet. A few cards and tickets from elsewhere in Florence bring the price down to €10, and one of them has a name that’s easy to confuse: the Destination Florence Card isn’t the Firenze Card. The first gets you €2 off, the second gets you in.

All these reductions and free entries are for the museum’s collection. They don’t apply to the guided tours run by the museum’s staff, to the guided tours of the Archive or to the temporary exhibitions.

The Firenze Card at the Zeffirelli Museum: temporary exhibitions included too

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes the Zeffirelli Museum, and the museum says the card covers its temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collection. At the Uffizi or the Accademia the card still means booking a time, but here the museum only asks you to show it at the entrance.

Its €12 entry is one of the cheaper ones the card covers, so the Zeffirelli helps the sums without deciding them. The card starts paying off at around four of the big paid museums, and with only the Uffizi and the Accademia it loses. Our page on the Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes runs the sums for your own list.

The other passes on this site all leave it out: the Uffizi Passepartout, the Pitti and Boboli pass and the Uffizi and Accademia combo. So do the Duomo passes.

Zeffirelli Museum opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday

The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00 and closes on Mondays, but the ticket desk shuts at 17:00, and that’s your last chance to get in. In April, May, June, September and October the Music Hall also holds concerts, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 18:00. Hours can change for events and public holidays, and the museum posts any change on its website.

Firenze: Days of Destruction, the 1966 flood at the Zeffirelli Museum

From 4 to 29 November 2026, the Music Room holds Firenze: Days of Destruction, an exhibition on the flood that hit Florence in 1966, as Zeffirelli saw it. The subject is already in the permanent collection, which has a space on a 1966 documentary about the flood.

If you’re planning on a reduced ticket, remember the rule above: reductions don’t apply to temporary exhibitions. The museum says the Firenze Card covers its temporary exhibitions, but we couldn’t confirm whether the €12 ticket includes this one, so ask at the desk.

Inside the Zeffirelli Museum: Callas, Shakespeare, the studio and Dante’s Inferno

The visit opens with Zeffirelli’s mentor, Luchino Visconti, the Italian film and theatre director. Rooms 1 and 2 show sets designed for Visconti’s productions by Salvador Dalí, the Surrealist painter, and by Zeffirelli himself, and next to them is an immersive room for Maria Callas, the opera singer, built around four operas.

Two rooms follow his theatre work. Shakespeare is there with Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic in London, with Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Albert Finney in the casts, and so are plays by the Italian writers Verga, De Filippo and Pirandello and the Americans Albee and Miller. In room 6, a 30-minute film runs through his whole career.

The second wing is opera, which the museum calls its heart, with a multimedia room and augmented reality you see through an app. Room 15 tells the story of the film he wanted to make of Dante’s Inferno, the poem by Florence’s great medieval writer. The visit ends with cinema: set photos with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Mel Gibson, Cher and Olivia Hussey, and a tribute to Piero Tosi, the costume designer. There’s an audio guide for the collection, and visits for children and families. The museum doesn’t give a visit time, but the film in room 6 takes 30 minutes on its own, and visitors talk of about two hours for the whole museum.

San Firenze: the Baroque courthouse that became the Zeffirelli Museum

The building is older than anything on its walls. The Oratorians, the religious order of St Philip Neri, had the San Firenze complex built in the 17th century, and later Florence’s law courts moved in, staying until the 2010s.

Once the courts had gone, the complex was handed back to the city. Zeffirelli, born in Florence in 1923, saw his foundation set up in 2017, and the museum opened on 1 October that year, two years before his death in 2019.

Getting to the Zeffirelli Museum on Piazza San Firenze

The museum is at Piazza San Firenze 5, between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Bargello and a few steps from Piazza della Signoria, so from the centre you walk round to the back of the Palazzo Vecchio and you’re there. From Santa Maria Novella it’s 10 minutes on foot, or bus C to the Ghibellina-Bargello stop. The museum itself is up on the first floor, and there’s a step-free way all the way in.