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Styled after a 1920s American speakeasy, often with live music in the back.

Soak up Italy in style at a classy café with tables right on the Piazza della Signoria.

A famous outdoor market offering leather goods, fashion items and marbled paper. The adjacent food market is open every morning except Sunday.

Cosimo il Vecchio de’ Medici commissioned Michelozzo to build this Dominican monastery in 1437. This was Fra Angelico’s home (see Fra Angelico (1395–1455)). He frescoed his brothers’ cells with devotional images and left a plethora of golden altarpieces now housed downstairs near Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper in the refectory. Fra Bartolomeo’s portrait of Savonarola hangs in the “Mad Monk’s” room, beside a scene of the theocrat’s fiery death (see Florence).

Florence’s “Westminster Abbey” contains the tombs of such Tuscan geniuses as Michelangelo and Galileo, as well as Giotto frescoes and a renowned leather school. Off the lovely cloisters are a Renaissance chapel designed by Brunelleschi (decorated by Luca della Robbia), and a small museum with a Last Supper by Taddeo Gaddi and Cimabue’s Crucifix , restored after the infamous 1966 flood.

Brunelleschi’s portico is studded with terracotta foundlings by Andrea della Robbia. The Pinacoteca inside houses paintings by Botticelli and Ghirlandaio.

Florence’s major churches are covered fully on and the cathedral on (see The Duomo Group, Florence).

Florence’s religious heart: Giotto’s lithe belltower, the Baptistry’s Gates of Paradise and Byzantine mosaics, and the Duomo museum’s Michelangelo and Donatello sculptures – all lorded over by Brunelleschi’s dome, a miracle of Renaissance engineering and architecture.

The greatest gallery of Renaissance art on earth, a veritable living textbook of Western art’s most shining moments, showcasing masterpieces from Giotto and Botticelli through Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci to Titian, Caravaggio and Rembrandt.