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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.

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.

This brawny Mannerist mansion served as Florence’s royal home from 1560 until the 1860s, when Florence did a stint as Italy’s capital. Backed by the elaborate Boboli Gardens, the palace’s seven museums include the excellent Galleria Palatina of late Renaissance/early Baroque painting.

Michelangelo’s proud David (1501–4) stands pensively at the end of a corridor lined by the artist’s Slaves . The plaster casts crowding one long room hint that this is still a fine arts academy (the statues’ black “pimples” are reference points to help students copy the works). (see Florence’s Accademia)

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.

The shops hanging from both sides of Taddeo Gaddi’s 1354 “old bridge” have housed gold- and silversmiths since Ferdinando I evicted the butchers in the 16th century (his private corridor from the Uffizi to the Pitti passed overhead, and he couldn’t stand the smell). Even the Nazis, blowing up bridges to slow the Allied advance, found the span too beautiful to destroy and instead took down the buildings at either end.

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).

Arnolfo di Cambio’s mighty town hall (1299–1302) is still Florence’s seat of government. Cosimo I hired Vasari to redecorate in the 1540s, frescoing a Medici marriage around Michelozzo’s 1453 courtyard and swathing the gargantuan Sala dei Cinquecento with an apotheosis of the Medici dynasty. Francesco I shut himself away from matters of state in his Studiolo to conduct scientific experiments.

Florence’s public living room and outdoor sculpture gallery. Michelangelo called Ammannati’s Neptune fountain a “waste of good marble”. Lining the Palazzo Vecchio’s arringheria – the platform from which orators “harangued” the crowds – are copies of Donatello’s Marzocco (Florence’s leonine symbol) and Judith , and Michelangelo’s David . The only original, Bandinelli’s Hercules (1534), was derided by Cellini as a “sack of melons”. Orcagna’s lovely 14th-century Loggia dei Lanzi shelters Cellini’s masterpiece Perseus (1545) and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1583).

Florence’s sculpture gallery, installed in a medieval town hall and prison, contains early Michelangelos, Mannerist Giambologna’s gravity-defying Flying Mercury (1564) and the city’s best Donatello collection, including Davids in marble and bronze (the first nude since antiquity) and a puzzled St George (1416).