Florence.

Founded in 1784 to train young artists, the Galleria dell’Accademia is far more than the home of David. Michelangelo’s unfinished Prisoners reveal figures still emerging from stone, alongside Renaissance paintings and historic musical instruments.

Commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici, the family’s first great residence became a model for Renaissance palaces. Its deliberately austere exterior hides the Chapel of the Magi, where Medici portraits appear inside a magnificent sacred procession.

Santa Maria Novella is a Dominican complex where architecture and painting reveal the birth of Renaissance space. Alberti created perfect geometric balance on the façade, while Masaccio’s Holy Trinity turns a flat wall into an illusion of depth.

Santa Maria del Fiore grew over centuries as Florence’s greatest civic and religious project. Brunelleschi crowned it with a dome built without traditional wooden centering, turning an engineering rivalry into the city’s defining silhouette.

One of Florence’s oldest religious buildings, the Baptistery welcomed generations of Florentines, including Dante. Its celebrated bronze doors grew out of the competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi that helped ignite the Renaissance.

The square stands over Florence’s ancient Roman forum, but much of what you see today comes from a dramatic nineteenth-century transformation that erased the medieval market district.

Set in the neighbourhood traditionally associated with Dante, the museum reconstructs the Florence of guilds, rival factions and political exile that shaped both the poet and his work.

Florence’s great Franciscan basilica brings together Giotto’s frescoes and the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini. Dante has a monument here, although his remains are still in Ravenna.

For centuries this square and Palazzo Vecchio formed Florence’s political stage. Michelangelo’s David originally stood at the palace entrance as a warning that the small Republic would defend itself against more powerful rivals.

Vasari designed the Uffizi as offices for Cosimo I de’ Medici, not as a museum. The family’s collection, now filled with works by Botticelli, Leonardo and Raphael, eventually became one of the world’s greatest public galleries.

The bridge once belonged to butchers, until Ferdinando I de’ Medici replaced them with goldsmiths in 1593. Above the shops, the Vasari Corridor allowed the ruling family to cross Florence unseen.