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Piazza della Repubblica is not as old as it looks. It was cleared in the 1880s, when the city demolished the Mercato Vecchio and most of the old Jewish ghetto to build a modern square in its place. The big arch on the west side still carries an inscription boasting that the ancient centre had been rescued from centuries of squalor. Plenty of Florentines disagreed at the time, and some still do.
Most visitors walk under that arch without reading it. It is also where our private Florence half day tour begins, at nine in the morning, outside Caffè Gilli on the corner with Via Roma. Your guide is there for your group only, for the next three hours, and that inscription is a good place to start. It sets up the question that runs through the whole walk: what Florence decided to keep, and what it knocked down.
How a Private Florence Half Day Tour Works
The tour is called the Private Essential Florence Walking Tour, and the name is accurate. It covers the essentials of the historic centre on foot, from the Roman forum under Piazza della Repubblica to the Oltrarno on the other side of the Arno. Along the way you see Orsanmichele, the medieval streets around Dante's house, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Campanile from outside, the Strozzi and Rucellai palaces, Piazza della Signoria and the Loggia dei Lanzi, then two bridges and the start of the Oltrarno.
On paper that looks like a list anyone could follow with a map. You could. Most of these places are free to look at from the street, and the centre is small enough to cross in a few minutes walk. What you would miss is the reading of them.
A good example is the Dante house. The building called Casa di Dante is an early twentieth-century reconstruction, put up near where the Alighieri family is thought to have lived. Without someone telling you that, you stand in front of it and take a photo. With a guide, the house becomes a way into the streets around it, which really are medieval, and into the reason a city that exiled its greatest poet later spent so much effort building him a home.
That is the job of the guide on this tour. The landmarks are the same ones in every guidebook. The guide's work is joining them up, so that the guild statues at Orsanmichele, the money behind the Strozzi palace and the Medici in the frescoes all turn out to be part of one story.
The Church Most People Walk Past
Santa Trinita is the one interior visit on the tour, and it shows better than anywhere what the guide is for.
The church sits on a busy corner of Via Tornabuoni, between the designer shops, and from outside it is easy to ignore. Inside, the Sassetti Chapel is covered with Domenico Ghirlandaio's frescoes of the life of Saint Francis, painted in the 1480s for Francesco Sassetti, a banker who managed money for the Medici. Ghirlandaio moved one of the scenes from Assisi to Florence. Behind the saint is Piazza della Signoria as it looked in his day, and in the foreground, among the onlookers, stands Lorenzo the Magnificent.
You will have walked through that square earlier in the morning. Seeing it again in a fresco painted five hundred years ago, with the man who ran the city standing in front of it, is the kind of moment that is hard to get from a guidebook. Your guide will also explain why a banker would want his boss painted into his family chapel, which is a story about money and loyalty more than religion.
Right outside the church, Ponte Santa Trinita crosses the Arno. It was blown up by the retreating German army in August 1944, like every bridge in Florence except the Ponte Vecchio, and rebuilt in the 1950s with stones recovered from the riverbed. The Ponte Vecchio follows, with the Vasari Corridor running along the top, built so the Medici could cross the city without walking among the people they governed. On the far side the corridor passes through the front of Santa Felicita, where the family had a private balcony to hear mass above the congregation.
Questions, Detours and the Pace
Because the group is yours, the pace is too. Families can stop when children need a break. Anyone more interested in architecture than in the Medici can steer the conversation that way, and the guide will adjust the stories without dropping the main thread. Questions are the point, so ask them. A recording cannot tell you why the Strozzi palace looks like a fortress, or answer when you want to know whether that gelato place is any good.
Starting at nine also helps. Florence sits in a river basin, and in July the average high is around 33°C. A walk that ends around noon avoids the worst of it, and leaves the gelato tasting at a sensible hour. Comfortable shoes matter more than people think, since most of the route is on stone paving, and shoulders should be covered for the visit inside Santa Trinita.
Planning the Rest of Your Day
A half day with a guide makes the afternoon easier to use. Some people book a museum next. The Uffizi in particular makes more sense once you know who the Medici, the Strozzi and the Sassetti were, because their names are all over the walls. Others prefer to go back to the workshops and streets they passed in the Oltrarno. Note that both the Uffizi and the Accademia close on Mondays, so a Monday morning walk is a good use of a day when the big galleries are shut.
If you only have one day in Florence, our Florence one day itinerary looks at how to choose what to prioritise when you cannot see everything.
Is It the Right Tour for You?
It suits first-time visitors best. Three hours with a guide at the start of a trip gives you the outline of the city, and everything you see afterwards fits into it. Our article on a private Florence tour for first-time visitors goes into this in more detail.
It also works well for couples, small families and anyone who would rather talk to a person than listen to an audio guide. If you have been to Florence before, the stories still change the way familiar places look.
There is also a small-group version of the same walk, the Essential Florence Walking Tour, which starts from €35 and follows the same route. The difference is who sets the rhythm. In a group, the guide balances everyone's questions and keeps to a shared pace. On the private tour, the three hours are built around what your own group wants to know, and you can spend longer wherever something catches your attention.
The private Florence half day tour leaves at 9:00 from Piazza della Repubblica, in front of Caffè Gilli, and lasts three hours. It includes an English-speaking local guide, the visit inside Santa Trinita and a gelato tasting, and starts from €250. You can cancel for free up to 24 hours before departure.
