Santa Maria Novella, Florence

The Dominicans arrive, 1221

The Dominicans were given the small church of Santa Maria delle Vigne, then outside the city walls, in 1221. The present basilica was begun around 1276–1279 and consecrated in 1420. Its plan is a preaching church like Santa Croce at the opposite end of the centre, and the two orders effectively bracketed medieval Florence between them, Franciscans east and Dominicans west.

In 1439 the Council of Florence, the attempt to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, sat in this building. Vasari remodelled the interior in 1567 for Cosimo I, shortening the side chapels — the same tidying-up operation he carried out at Santa Croce.

Alberti's façade for Giovanni Rucellai, 1470

The lower half, in white marble and green serpentino from Prato, dates from about 1350. Giovanni Rucellai paid Leon Battista Alberti to finish the front, completed in 1470: a classical temple front stacked on a Gothic base, tied together by the two great scrolls at the sides. Those scrolls solved the problem of a high nave meeting low aisles, and church builders copied them across Italy for the next two centuries.

On the façade are Ignazio Danti's astronomical instruments of 1572 — an armillary sphere and a quadrant, set up by a Dominican friar-astronomer whose calculations fed into the Gregorian calendar reform ten years later.

The Holy Trinity, left aisle

Masaccio's Holy Trinity, painted in the mid-1420s, is the first monumental painting built on a single, mathematically constructed vanishing point: a barrel-vaulted chapel that is not there, cut into a flat wall. Stand back to the middle of the nave and the coffered vault opens; step to the side and it collapses. Below, a painted skeleton on a tomb carries the line telling the viewer that what he is, you will be.

Giotto's painted Crucifix, from around 1290, hangs in the nave; Brunelleschi's wooden Crucifix of about 1410–15 is in the Gondi Chapel — the one Vasari says he carved to answer Donatello's, whose original is over at Santa Croce.

The Tornabuoni Chapel: Ghirlandaio, 1485–90

The main chapel behind the high altar was frescoed by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his workshop between 1485 and 1490 with the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist, staged in the houses and clothes of contemporary Florence — the Tornabuoni family are in the crowd scenes. A teenaged Michelangelo was apprenticed in that workshop while the scaffolding was up. Giambologna's bronze crucifix stands on the altar in front of it.

The Strozzi chapels, and the pulpit Galileo was denounced from

The Filippo Strozzi Chapel was frescoed by Filippino Lippi in 1502, in the strange, over-heated late style that reads more like Rome than Florence. The Strozzi di Mantova Chapel in the transept keeps Nardo di Cione's Last Judgement, Hell and Paradise of 1350–57, painted with Dante's poem open beside the painter.

The pulpit on the third nave pier, designed by Brunelleschi and carved by Buggiano in 1443, is where a Dominican friar first denounced Galileo's Copernicanism from the pulpit in 1614 — a fact worth carrying across town to the Museo Galileo, which holds his instruments.

The cloisters, the Spanish Chapel and the refectory

The Green Cloister takes its name from the terra verde pigment of Paolo Uccello's Flood frescoes, damaged and ghostly but still readable. Off it is the Spanish Chapel, the Dominican chapter house frescoed by Andrea di Bonaiuto in 1365–67 with the whole Dominican programme on four walls, including a black-and-white dog pun on the order's name. The refectory holds Plautilla Nelli's Last Supper, a large signed painting by a sixteenth-century Dominican nun, restored and hung in 2019.

These rooms take the second half of your hour and empty out much faster than the nave.

Last admission is one hour before closing on every day, so the practical cut-off is 16:30 from Monday to Friday and 16:00 on Saturday and Sunday. Friday's 11:00 start and Sunday's 13:00 start are the two that catch visitors who planned a morning here.

Seven dates a year are closed altogether: 1 January, 6 January, 15 August, 1 November, 8 December, 25 December and Easter Sunday. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday the basilica opens for prayer only, which means no cloisters and no Spanish Chapel. The site was also carrying an alert about early 15:00 closures on some August and September 2026 dates — check it on the day you plan to go.

Groups are capped at twenty-five people plus the guide, and headsets are required from six people up. Personal prayer and attendance at services are free at any hour the church is open for them.

• Quietest slot: Monday to Thursday at 09:00
• Worst plan: Friday or Sunday morning — the doors are shut until 11:00 and 13:00
• Groups: maximum 25 plus guide; headsets required from 6 people

The Dominicans were here from 1221 and were distilling and compounding for the convent long before the doors opened to the public on 15 October 1612. The rooms you can walk through today are the entrance corridor, the Sala Grande — the former Chapel of San Niccolò of 1332, refitted in neo-Gothic dress between 1848 and 1858 — the Sacrestia, used as a storeroom from 1612, the Antica Spezieria that was the sales room from 1612 to 1848 and now houses the herbalist, and the Sala Verde of 1335–37.

The company's own page describes about three thousand visitors a day. No ticket is sold and no opening hours are stated on the pages we fetched, so treat it as retail: walk in, look at the vaulted rooms and the cases, and buy something or not. If somebody sells you a "pharmacy tour ticket", that is their tour, not an entry fee.

Going from the basilica: out of the piazza on the north-west corner, along Via della Scala, and it is on the left at number 16.

• Via della Scala 16, three minutes from the basilica
• Public pharmacy since 15 October 1612; convent on the site from 1221
• No ticket sold; hours not stated on the official pages we fetched

The square in front of the church was laid out as a racecourse. From 1563 until the late nineteenth century the Palio dei Cocchi, a chariot race, ran here on the eve of the feast of St John, and the two marble obelisks marked the turns. They stand on bronze tortoises cast by Giambologna's workshop in 1608, which is the detail to look for at ground level — four small tortoises taking the weight of each obelisk.

Around the base of the façade run the avelli, the arcaded family tombs of the medieval city. Domenico Ghirlandaio, who frescoed the main chapel inside, is buried in one of them. The piazza itself is open at all hours and free; it is one of the few large squares in Florence with grass and benches, and it fills with people at lunchtime.

The visitor entrance is on Piazza Santa Maria Novella 18, on the piazza side, not through the great central doors. Florence's main railway station, Firenze Santa Maria Novella, is named after the church and stands about three minutes behind it, on Piazza della Stazione; if you have just got off a train, you are already there. Trains, trams, left luggage and airport connections are covered on the getting around page — this page does not deal with the station.

From the Duomo it is a ten-minute walk down Via de' Cerretani. An urban bus or tram ticket costs €2 (about $2.30) and is valid for 90 minutes under the fares in force from 1 August 2026, or €3 bought on board; the T1 and T2 tram lines both call at the station. The centre is a ZTL, closed to unauthorised cars Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00, and the station car parks are the nearest legal option if you are driving.

• Visitor entrance: Piazza Santa Maria Novella 18
• Firenze S.M.N. station: 3 minutes behind the church
• 10 minutes on foot from the Duomo via Via de' Cerretani
• Bus or tram €2 (about $2.30), valid 90 minutes; €3 on board

It is a first-morning church. You arrive by train, the basilica is three minutes from the platforms, it opens at 09:00 Monday to Thursday and it costs €7.50 — an hour here orients you before the ticketed queues of the afternoon. Then walk east: San Lorenzo, the market, the Duomo, all within ten minutes.

If you are collecting churches rather than museums, pair it with Santa Croce at the far end of the centre for the tombs and the Pazzi Chapel, and end the day at San Miniato al Monte, which is free and sings vespers at 18:30. Every church in the city with its price, hours, closed day and dress rule is set side by side on the Florence churches page; the three-day itinerary places this one on the first morning, and the full attractions list ranks it against everything else. The rest of the guide starts from the Florence city guide homepage.