Basilica of Santa Croce

A preaching barn that became a national monument

The Franciscans built wide and plain on purpose: a single high nave with an open truss roof carries a voice to a standing crowd better than a vaulted one, and the sixteen chapels along the transept were paid for by the banking families who wanted their names beside the altar — Bardi, Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Pazzi. The building was finished and consecrated in 1442.

In 1560 Cosimo I had Giorgio Vasari strip out the choir screen that had divided lay congregation from friars, and the nave you walk down today is the space that operation opened up. The tomb monuments were then arranged along the side walls, which is why they read like a gallery rather than a graveyard.

The façade is much younger than the church behind it: Niccolò Matas designed the polychrome marble front between 1857 and 1863, and the bell tower went up in 1842. Both were built when Florence was about to become the capital of a new Italian state and the church was being turned, deliberately, into its pantheon.

November 1966: the flood mark you can still find

Santa Croce sits low and close to the Arno, and on 4 November 1966 the flood put water, mud and heating oil through the church and the refectory. Cimabue's great painted Crucifix was the most famous casualty; what survived of it hangs in the refectory museum today and is shown as a damaged object rather than a restored one, which is the honest way to show it.

The restoration effort — the mud angels, the volunteers who carried panels out of the water — is part of why this complex has a museum at all. Look for the flood-level plaques on the walls of the piazza and the surrounding streets: the water reached well above head height on this side of town.

Michelangelo, on the right as you enter

Michelangelo died in Rome in 1564 and his body came back to Florence. Giorgio Vasari designed the monument, with the three seated figures — Painting, Sculpture and Architecture — carved by Valerio Cioli, Giovanni Bandini and Battista Lorenzi. It is the first tomb on the right-hand wall, which is a piece of staging: the Florentine who left is placed where every visitor meets him first.

Galileo, opposite, and the century he had to wait

Galileo Galilei's monument stands on the left wall, near the entrance and directly across from Michelangelo. He died in 1642 under house arrest after his condemnation, and his remains were only moved into the body of the church long afterwards. The pairing across the nave — the artist and the astronomer — is the single most reproduced image of this church, and it is the reason a physics-minded traveller comes here at all.

Machiavelli, Rossini and the rest of the wall

Niccolò Machiavelli's monument, carved by Innocenzo Spinazzi in 1787, carries the line about no eulogy matching such a name. Gioachino Rossini's tomb, by Giuseppe Cassioli, is a nineteenth-century addition of the same nation-building impulse as the façade. Further along are the humanist Leonardo Bruni's tomb by Bernardo Rossellino and Carlo Marsuppini's by Desiderio da Settignano — the two wall tombs that art historians come specifically to see, and that most visitors walk past.

In the cloister there is also a monument to Florence Nightingale, who was born in the city in 1820 and named after it.

Dante is not buried here

The large seated Dante monument you meet in the nave is a cenotaph of 1829 — an empty tomb. Dante died in exile in Ravenna in 1321 and Ravenna has never given him back. The statue outside on the left of the façade, the one everybody photographs from the piazza, is also nineteenth-century.

If somebody tells you Florence's greatest poet lies in Florence's pantheon, this is the sentence that corrects them.

Giotto's chapels — and which one you can see in 2026

Two chapels at the east end were frescoed by Giotto: the Bardi Chapel with the Life of St Francis and the Peruzzi Chapel with the lives of the two St Johns. The Bardi Chapel is under restoration, so treat the Peruzzi as the Giotto of this visit and check the basilica's news page before travelling if the Bardi is your reason for coming.

In the Bardi di Vernio chapel nearby, Maso di Banco frescoed the story of St Sylvester between about 1335 and 1338 — a Giotto pupil working at close to Giotto's level, in a chapel almost nobody enters.

Donatello: the Cavalcanti Annunciation and the wooden Crucifix

Donatello's Cavalcanti Annunciation is a gilded limestone relief set into the right-hand nave wall, an angel and a Virgin caught in the half-second after the sentence lands. His wooden Crucifix hangs in the Bardi di Vernio chapel; Vasari tells the story of Brunelleschi calling it a peasant on a cross and carving his own in reply, the one that hangs in Santa Maria Novella. Seeing both in one day is a good afternoon.

The Pazzi Chapel, in the first cloister

Walk out of the church into the first cloister and the Pazzi Chapel is straight ahead: a small domed chapter house of the 1470s built to a design associated with Brunelleschi, with grey pietra serena framing white plaster and Luca della Robbia's glazed terracotta roundels of the apostles around the walls. It is the quietest room in the complex and the one to sit down in — most visitors put their heads round the door and leave.

The refectory: Taddeo Gaddi's Last Supper and the Cimabue Crucifix

The museum occupies the old refectory, where Taddeo Gaddi painted a Last Supper below a Tree of Life around 1340 — the prototype for every Florentine monastic refectory that followed. The damaged Cimabue Crucifix is here too. The former dormitory next door houses the Scuola del Cuoio, the leather school founded after the Second World War, which you can walk into from the cloister; the workshops and shops of the quarter around it are covered on the Santa Croce neighbourhood page.

Santa Croce opens Monday to Saturday 09:30–17:30 and Sunday and religious holidays 14:00–17:30. Last entry is 17:00 on every day, so an arrival at 17:15 buys nothing. The only annual closure is 25 December.

On the free days the complex runs shorter: no online booking, tickets collected on site, and last entry pulled back to 16:30. The 2026 dates are 15 August, 14 September, 26–27 September, 4 October, 8 November, 20 December and 26 December. Note that these have nothing to do with the state-museum first-Sunday scheme that covers the Uffizi and the Accademia — a free Sunday at the Uffizi is a normal paying day here.

The dress rule is written down and enforced at the door: shoulders and legs covered. Free disposable robes are handed out if you arrive in a vest and shorts in August, which is the usual August scene on the steps. Other Florence churches vary; the comparison of every church's price, hours and dress rule sets them side by side.

• Monday–Saturday 09:30–17:30, last entry 17:00
• Sunday and religious holidays 14:00–17:30, last entry 17:00
• Closed 25 December only
• Free days 2026: 15 August, 14 September, 26–27 September, 4 October, 8 November, 20 December, 26 December — on site only, last entry 16:30
• Official visit estimate: about 50 minutes

The entrance is on the piazza at Piazza Santa Croce 16, on the right-hand side of the façade as you look at it — not through the central bronze doors, which are the church's own. The ticket desk is inside that entrance, and the exit puts you back out through the cloister shop.

The basilica is about 800 metres east of the Duomo, which is a ten-minute walk down Via del Proconsolo and Borgo dei Greci, past the Bargello. From Santa Maria Novella station allow twenty minutes on foot; the C1 and C2 electric minibuses run through this part of the centre, and an urban bus or tram ticket costs €2 (about $2.30) and is valid 90 minutes, at the new fares in force since 1 August 2026 — €3 if you buy it from the driver. Route letters change, so check the stop sign rather than trusting a blog, including this one.

Do not drive to it. The whole centre is a ZTL, closed to unauthorised cars Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00, with a summer night closure Thursday to Saturday 23:00–03:00 from the first Thursday of April to the first Sunday of October. Hotels inside the zone register your plate at reception; everyone else parks outside it. The getting around page has the fares and the zone in full.

• Entrance: right of the façade, Piazza Santa Croce 16
• 10 minutes on foot from the Duomo, 20 from Santa Maria Novella station
• Urban bus or tram €2 (about $2.30), valid 90 minutes; €3 on board
• ZTL: Monday–Friday 07:30–20:00, Saturday 07:30–16:00

It is an afternoon church. The Duomo complex and the state museums want your morning slots, Santa Croce takes walk-ups until 17:00, and the quarter around it is where the city eats afterwards — so the natural shape is Bargello at 14:00, Santa Croce at 15:30, dinner in the streets behind the piazza. On a Sunday, flip it: nothing here opens before 14:00.

If you are pairing churches, Santa Maria Novella at the other end of the centre holds Masaccio's Trinity and Brunelleschi's Crucifix and costs €7.50, and San Miniato al Monte above the river is free and sings vespers at 18:30 — a full church day with an evening. The three-day Florence itinerary places this visit on its second afternoon, and the whole attractions list ranks it against everything else by time needed. Every church in the city with its price, hours and closed day is compared on the Florence churches page, and the rest of the guide starts from the Florence city guide homepage.