Florence Palace Tickets and Medici Palace Tours

Every Florentine palace in this catalogue answers to a different desk, and the differences are not decorative. Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Garden are the state's, held by the Gallerie degli Uffizi. Palazzo Medici Riccardi belongs to the Citta Metropolitana di Firenze. The museum inside Palazzo Vecchio belongs to the city. Two of the four are run day to day by the same foundation, MUS.E, and they still keep different closing days from each other. There is no shared timetable and no reason to expect one.

The practical version of that is a table. Note in particular the two rows that trip people up: the tower of Palazzo Vecchio is a separate and dearer ticket than the museum underneath it, and the Boboli Garden does not close on the same Mondays as the palace it belongs to.

On a Monday the Pitti museums are shut. The garden behind them is open unless it is the first or last Monday of the month, which is the single most useful thing to know about a Florentine Monday, and Palazzo Vecchio and Medici Riccardi are both working normally. A Monday is not a lost day here; it is a day on the north bank with a garden in the afternoon.

On a Wednesday Medici Riccardi is closed and everything else is open, so the Medici half of the story has to be told in Palazzo Vecchio and at Pitti instead. On a Thursday the trap is the afternoon: Palazzo Vecchio and its tower both stop at 14:00 while every other building in the city runs to the evening, so a Thursday works if the town hall comes first and fails if it comes last. Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the four days on which all four palaces are open for a full day.

One more rule applies everywhere and quietly removes the last hour of any plan: the ticket desks close an hour before the buildings do. Medici Riccardi stops selling at 18:00 for a 19:00 close, Palazzo Vecchio does the same, and the Boboli Garden stops admitting an hour before its own closing time, which in December is 15:30. Arriving at four in the afternoon in winter is arriving after the garden has stopped letting people in.

The card costs 85 EUR and runs 72 hours from first use, one entry per museum, across more than sixty Florentine museums. All four buildings compared here are in it: Palazzo Pitti, the Boboli Garden, the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Medici Riccardi. For a trip that also takes in the Uffizi and the Accademia it is the obvious instrument, and it removes the need to think about time slots at Pitti entirely.

For these four palaces alone the arithmetic does not work, and it is worth doing before buying. The combined Pitti and Boboli ticket is 22 EUR at the counter, Palazzo Vecchio's museum is 18 and Medici Riccardi is 15 in high season: 55 EUR of doors against a card of 85. The card pays for itself on the rest of the circuit, not on the palaces. There is also one gap in the record worth knowing: the card's own museum list names the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio and says nothing about the Arnolfo Tower, which is a separate and more expensive ticket. We could not confirm that the tower is included, so plan on paying its 20 EUR.

Not one of the 32 Florentine listings includes a hotel pickup, and none of them needs to. Palazzo Vecchio stands on Piazza della Signoria inside the pedestrian centre and its own museum page says simply that you walk there. Palazzo Medici Riccardi is a few minutes north, close to the cathedral. Palazzo Pitti is the only one across the river, at Piazza de' Pitti 1, and the Gallerie degli Uffizi publish no public transport information for it at all, which tells you what the institution expects you to do.

That geography is why the Florentine product is a route rather than a door, and why 24 of the 32 listings finish inside two hours. A guide who has three palaces within a walk does not need half a day. It is also why 30 of the 32 allow free cancellation, the highest rate anywhere in the Italian catalogue: there is no coach to fill and no allocation of timed tickets at risk, so a supplier can afford to let you change your mind.

Three amber rows in a seasonal table look like a failure of research. They are the finding. In a city where the outdoor half of the visit is one walled garden, the year does very little, and the planning effort that other destinations spend on months has to go into days of the week instead. The one real seasonal decision in Florence is whether the garden is worth its own afternoon, and between November and February, when it closes at half past four and stops admitting at half past three, the answer is usually no.

Take out the three products under 10 EUR, which are tipped walking tours with a token booking fee, not tickets, and the Florentine median is 99 EUR, with a first quartile of 69 and a third of 150. Two listings run past 250 and both are private. Six are private in total, four are small group, and exactly one puts skip the line in its title, which is the lowest share in the Italian catalogue and an accurate reflection of a city where the queues that matter are inside the buildings rather than at their doors.

Thirty of the 32 come from Viator and two from Civitatis. The best rated Florentine product with a serious sample is that 2.99 EUR walk at 5.0, and the worst is a 89 EUR ninety-minute visit to Palazzo Pitti and the Palatine Gallery at 4.2 across 44 reviews. Between the two sits the shape of the market: a cheap, crowded, highly rated walk that goes past the palaces, and a set of paid guided visits that go in. They are not competing for the same afternoon, and the price gap between them, roughly thirty to one, is the clearest statement in this catalogue of what a guide is worth when the ticket is 15 EUR.