Getting Around Florence

Buy before you board wherever you can. The driver sells a ticket, but at a mark-up, and the machines at every tram stop take cards.

That last row answers the question this site gets asked most often. There is no tourist day pass in Florence: the 2026 sheet lists singles, the ten-ride carnet at €18.20, then monthly €42.20, quarterly €104.50 (about $122) and annual €342.80 (about $401), and nothing in between. If you want a multi-ride option for a family, the carnet is it — ten rides at €1.82 each, and one carnet can cover several people on the same trip as long as each of them validates.

The fares are identical on the tram, which matters mainly for the airport: there is no airport surcharge and no separate airport ticket. Ninety minutes is generous for a city this size; the longest ride a visitor takes, the airport tram, uses twenty of them.

Four channels sell you the same €2 ride. The operator's app sells singles and passes; the machines at every tram stop sell singles only and take cards and contactless; a tabacchi or newsagent with the operator's sticker sells paper tickets over the counter; and the readers inside the tram take a contactless card, a phone or a watch directly. The 2026 fare sheet also lists third-party apps — TABNET, URBI and TELEPASS — as sales channels. The SMS ticket at €2.40 needs an Italian mobile number, which is why it is the one channel most visitors can ignore.

Validate the moment you board. A paper ticket goes into the small machine by the door and comes out stamped with the time; a contactless tap is its own validation. The ninety minutes run from that stamp, not from the purchase, so a ticket bought at the airport on Tuesday and stamped on Thursday is perfectly valid. The fine for travelling without a validated ticket is not stated on the pages we read, so we do not print a figure — assume it is more than the ticket and stamp it.

One bag up to 10 kg and 55 by 40 by 20 centimetres travels free on the tram. A larger case, up to 80 by 45 by 25 centimetres and 20 kg, needs a supplementary ticket and you may carry at most two of them; anything bigger is refused. Pushchairs travel free. There are no luggage racks on the trams, which is worth knowing before the airport run with two suitcases at eight in the morning.

The trams are run by GEST, part of the RATP Dev group, and the line that matters to a visitor is T2: it runs from Peretola Aeroporto to San Marco – Università, and the operator's own airport page puts the centre twenty minutes from the terminal. The Peretola Aeroporto stop is a two-minute walk from arrivals and departures, and the airport itself is about 5 km from the middle of town. The fare is the ordinary urban ticket — €2, ninety minutes — because no separate airport fare is listed anywhere on the operator's fare page.

Service runs every day from 05:00 to 00:30, and until 02:00 on Friday and Saturday nights. From the airport towards San Marco the first tram is at 05:00 daily and the last at 23:58 Sunday to Thursday, 01:15 on Friday and Saturday. In the other direction, towards the airport, the first is also 05:00 and the last leaves at 00:30 Sunday to Thursday, 02:00 on Friday and Saturday. For a 06:30 flight that means the tram does not help you and the taxi does; for anything after about 07:30 it does.

The network also has a line T1, and the operator names T1 and T2 as its lines — but the page listing termini and stops renders its content in JavaScript and gave up nothing readable on 29 August 2026, so we do not print T1's route here rather than copy it from a blog. What we can say is that the tram skirts the historic centre on its west side: it is the way in from the airport and from the western suburbs, and it is no use at all for moving between the Duomo, the Uffizi and Santa Croce, which is what the walking times table is for.

Bus 12 climbs from Santa Maria Novella station to Piazzale Michelangelo, and it is the single most useful bus in the city for a visitor: the abbey of San Miniato al Monte names it on its own contact page as the way up, with the stairs from the Piazzale for the last stretch. Buy the €2 ticket before you get on, because the driver charges €3.

The walk up is about twenty-one minutes from the Duomo on the flat plus the Rampe del Poggi stairs, so the honest advice is to ride up and walk down: you get the view without the climb, and the descent through the Rampe gardens into Piazza Poggi is the better half of the walk anyway. If you are going for sunset, ride up before the light goes and take the stairs down afterwards while the terrace is still emptying. The judgement about which approach suits which visitor, and where to stand on the terrace, sits on the viewpoint's own page.

Other lines exist — bus 7 to Fiesole from Piazza San Marco is the other one visitors ask about — but the route numbers repeated across travel blogs for the hill are not all confirmed on an official page, and we print only the ones that are. Hop-on hop-off buses and private shuttles are not covered by the operator's fare sheet and are not covered here.

Taxis do not cruise for fares here: you find them at a rank — the station, Piazza della Repubblica, Piazza Santa Croce — or you call one, and the meter starts when the car sets off to collect you.

On top of the start, the meter runs at €1.00 a kilometre in the two urban bands and €1.99 a kilometre in the third, in eleven-cent steps, and it switches to a waiting rate of €28.60 an hour in band one when the traffic drops the car below about 27 km/h. Out-of-town runs are all charged at €1.99 a kilometre with motorway tolls added and paid by the passenger. The 'taxi multiplo' rate needs at least three people going to the same zone and is the one genuinely cheap way to take a taxi here.

The airport fare is where the internet is confidently wrong. A fixed price for the run between Peretola and the centre circulates widely; it is not on the Comune tariff table we read, so we do not publish it as official. Assume a metered fare on the figures above, or take the T2 tram for €2 and spend the difference on dinner.

The historic centre is a limited-traffic zone. Camera gates read every plate that crosses the line, and they are live Monday to Friday 7:30–20:00 and Saturday 7:30–16:00, off on Sundays and public holidays. From the first Thursday of April to the first Sunday of October a summer night ZTL is added on top: Thursday to Saturday, 23:00–03:00. There is no ticket to buy at the gate and no barrier to stop you — the first you hear of it is a letter, often months later, forwarded by the hire company with its own administration fee attached.

If your hotel is inside the zone, it can register you: give reception or the garage your plate the moment you arrive, and they transmit it to the Municipal Police. Do this on arrival, not at checkout. The fine amount is not stated on the city's own page; enquiries go to firenze@myfines.it or +39 055 0353400, which is a sentence worth keeping in a screenshot if a letter ever turns up.

The alternative is simple: leave the car at one of the Parcheggi Scambiatori, the park-and-ride sites on the edge of the city, and come in on the tram or a bus. Tourist coaches have their own regime — a ZTL Bus that covers the whole municipality 24 hours a day — which is why an organised day trip picks you up where it does rather than outside your hotel door. If parking is going to shape your booking, the neighbourhood guide is the page that maps which areas sit outside the gates.

Firenze Santa Maria Novella has a KiPoint left-luggage office on the ground floor inside the station, open 07:00–21:00. The station's own service page routes the price to the operator's website and states no figure, so we do not print one — ask at the counter or check before you commit to a plan that depends on it.

Two museums make their own arrangements, and both catch people out. The Accademia has no cloakroom at all: large bags, backpacks and helmets are refused at the door, bottles are limited to half a litre, and the nearest storage is the MyAccademia store outside. The Duomo complex sends luggage to a storage point at Piazza del Duomo 38/r before you climb anything. A guided walk can also solve it — the highlights walking tour at $20.27 lists free luggage storage among its inclusions, which on an arrival morning is worth more than the tour.

The practical shape of a last day: check out, walk the bags to the station, leave them at KiPoint, spend the afternoon at the Bargello or in the Oltrarno, collect at seven, and take the tram or the train. Nothing in that sequence needs a taxi.

The bands below are the second-class adult fares from that tariff. We could not source the kilometre band for Florence to Pisa, Lucca, Siena or La Spezia from an official page on 29 August 2026 — Trenitalia publishes no route fare list and its booking service refused automated queries — so we quote the table rather than invent a single-route price. Check the fare live when you buy.

Two rules save money and confusion. Children aged 4 to under 12 pay 50% of the adult fare on regional trains, so the 71–80 km band costs a child €4.50 rather than €8.90. And every station in the Florence node — Santa Maria Novella, Campo di Marte, Rifredi, Statuto, Le Cure, Castello, Rovezzano, San Marco Vecchio, Le Piagge — is ticketed simply as 'Firenze': the fare is measured from Santa Maria Novella and the ticket lets you start or finish at any of them, which is useful if your hotel is closer to Campo di Marte. Trenitalia's TAP&TAP channel also sells a single at the standard regional fare straight from a contactless card at the departure station.

For Siena, where the bus beats the train because the station sits below the town, Autolinee Toscane's fast-route fares also run on distance bands: band 8, which covers 70–80 km, is €10.90 (about $12.80) bought in advance and €16 (about $19) on board. We have not been able to verify from an official page that the Florence–Siena route is assigned to band 8, so treat it as the likely band and check at the counter. The route-by-route comparison of train, bus and coach for each destination lives on every day trip compared with the train.

Florence is flat inside the walls and paved in stone that is uneven almost everywhere, and the honest position is that most of what a visitor wants to know about step-free access is not published. What is published is worth knowing before you plan a route.

Orsanmichele states plainly on its own page that it has no disabled access and no restrooms. The Uffizi's accessible way in is the ramp on Via della Ninna rather than the main courtyard door, and the Accademia's accessible entrance is Via Ricasoli 60, next to the standard one at 58. Boboli has four entrances — Pitti, Via Romana, Forte di Belvedere and Porta Romana — and the gradient between the palace and the top of the garden is the reason to care which one you use. The Dome and the Bell Tower have 463 and 414 steps respectively and no lift of any kind, which is a fact, not a caveat.

On the transport side: pushchairs travel free on the tram, trams are level with the platform at their stops, and the Rampe del Poggi is a staircase, so bus 12 is the step-free way to the Piazzale. Stroller and wheelchair admission rules inside individual museums are not stated on the pages we fetched, and we would rather write that than guess at a lift that may not exist. If a specific venue matters to your trip, its own accessibility desk is the only source worth trusting.

Two charges surprise people, and neither is transport. The city tourist tax is collected by your accommodation, per person per night, for up to seven consecutive nights: €3.50 (about $4) at a one-star hotel or campsite up to €8 (about $9) at five stars, with €6 (about $7) covering B&Bs, holiday flats and three-star hotels. Children under 12 are exempt. The figures are the 2025 table, which the city's tourism site still published as current when we read it; the full grid by category sits on where to stay.

The Firenzecard is the other one. It costs €85 (about $99) and runs 72 hours from your first museum entry, and it does not include public transport of any kind — no bus, no tram, no airport ride. It also leaves out the Duomo complex. Whether it pays at all depends on how many museums you can physically get through in three days, which is the arithmetic on the card's own page.