Florence City Tours, Compared Format by Format

Florence has no single best city tour. Which one suits you depends on three things: whether you want the inside of the museums or the city from its streets, how you like to get around, and how many hours you can give it. A two-hour walk past the Duomo is a different morning from a guided hour with the David, and both differ from a coach day to Siena.

This page compares nine ways to tour the city: five formats (walking, golf cart, bike and food tours, and cooking classes), the three sights that sell timed entries (the David at the Accademia, the Duomo and the Uffizi), and day trips out of Florence. Each has its own page with its tours side by side, and the Florence city tours map shows where everything sits.

This site is a visitor guide, not the tour operator trading as “Florence City Tour” or the one trading as “City Florence Tours”, and it has no link with either.

How the formats compare

Durations, group rules and inclusions come from each page’s featured tour, as its own listing describes it, and from the city’s and the museums’ rules for 2026.

On a phone, swipe the table sideways.

Free sights, and what a guide adds

Much of Florence costs nothing to see. Ponte Vecchio, Piazzale Michelangelo and the basilica of San Miniato al Monte above it are free, and so is the Cathedral from Monday to Saturday. The Loggia dei Lanzi is still free, though since 23 January 2026 you need a free ticket collected on site. Things to do in Florence sorts the sights by ticket.

A street walk adds the route and the stories. The featured Highlights Walking Tour by My Green Tour srl passes Palazzo Medici Riccardi, San Lorenzo, the Duomo, Piazza della Repubblica, the Signoria and Ponte Vecchio; inside the Uffizi and the Accademia, only licensed professional guides may guide. Florence’s “free” walking tours are tip-based: you pay what you think the walk was worth, and GuruWalk, one of the platforms that lists them, suggests €15 to €50 a person. Free walking tours in Florence compares them with a paid walk.

What the tours cost

In October 2026, the median starting price of Florence’s well-rated tours (4.3 stars or more) was about $34 for a walking tour, $48 for a bike tour, $49 for a cooking class, $50 for the David and the Accademia, $55 for the Duomo, $64 for a food tour or a golf cart ride, and $88 for a day trip out of the city.

Those are medians, not quotes. Tour-Tale’s two fixed-price walks start from $14 and two pasta classes from $20, while Towns of Italy’s first-entry Duomo tour starts from $162 and Walkabout Tours’ Vespa ride from $169.

The museums’ own 2026 prices, set out below, sit inside many of these. A ticket product bundles the reservation, a guided tour adds the guide and a headset, and several listings warn that the security check at the door still applies.

The 2026 rules that change what a tour can do

Golf carts and rickshaws

Since 15 October 2025 a city regulation, council resolution 54 of 30 July 2025, bans tourist rides by golf cart, caddy or rickshaw across the whole UNESCO area: the old city inside the ring of avenues, plus San Miniato al Monte, with the Cascine park excepted. The one exception is white electric shuttles of up to eight passengers, run by a travel agency holding a Comune permit, on two fixed routes: route A along the western Lungarni, stopping at Lungarno Vespucci, and route B round Piazzale Michelangelo, stopping there. Neither may enter the core around the Duomo, the Signoria and Ponte Vecchio, and passengers board and leave only at the start or the end.

Since 1 April 2026 a licensed guide or tour leader drives or rides along. Leaving the route costs a permit holder €500, a vehicle with no permit is seized for confiscation, and the regional administrative court upheld the rules on 19 June 2026. Each permit runs for one year from its own decree, the first dated 15 April 2026.

ACCORD Italy Smart Tours and FPT SRL, whose tours are listed here, are among the agencies named in the Comune’s permit decrees. The two Fiesole tours head for the hills, but inside Florence the rule applies to them too, so ask any operator where its cart drives in the city.

Guides, headsets and group sizes

Since Law 190/2023 the tourist-guide licence is national: every guide must be on the national list, by passing the national exam or having a foreign qualification recognised, and guiding without it brings a fine of €3,000 to €12,000. Since February 2025 no guide may use a voice amplifier, whatever the group’s size, and groups of more than eight, not counting the guide, must use wireless headsets. On a street tour the headset is part of the rules, not an upgrade. Inside the museums the caps are tighter: at the Uffizi a group may not exceed 16 people including the guide and needs whisper headsets above six, and the Accademia allows 20 plus the guide.

New cooking schools

Since 30 April 2026 no new cooking school may open in the historic centre, or move into it, for five years unless it runs inside an existing licensed restaurant or bar. The rule concerns new openings; the classes on cooking classes all show dates, and two cook on farms outside the city.

Three sights to book ahead

Each of these runs on booked entry times, and none sells a way round the wait.

The Accademia and the David

The full ticket has cost €20 since 1 February 2026, plus €4 to book an entry time, and B-Ticket is the only official online channel. The gallery opens Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15 to 18:50, with last entry at 18:10. Tickets bought online or by phone carry the visitor’s name, and the museum warns that without a reservation the wait may be long. Its ticket conditions of 24 July 2026 forbid tour operators to use wording such as “skip the line”, “fast track” or “priority entrance”, and allow them to include tickets only inside a package, at face value. The David page features a timed-entry ticket with an audio app, marked Official ticket in its listing; the guided visits add a guide.

The Uffizi

In 2026 a ticket costs €25 bought on the day and €29 bought in advance, with no early-bird ticket and no low season; entry from 4 pm costs €16, or €20 in advance. Since 13 October 2025 every ticket carries the visitor’s name, and if it does not match the visitor’s ID there is no entry and no refund. The gallery opens Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15 to 18:30.

The Duomo

Only the Cathedral is free, Monday to Saturday from 10:15 to 15:45, with shoulders and knees covered and no flip-flops or hats. Everything else needs a ticket, and there are three passes, each valid for three calendar days with one entry per monument: the Brunelleschi Pass (€30 in 2026) covers the dome, Giotto’s Bell Tower, the Baptistery, Santa Reparata and the Museum, the Giotto Pass costs €20 and the Ghiberti Pass €15. There is no dome-only ticket. The climb, 463 steps with no lift, needs a time slot in the visitor’s name that cannot be changed or refunded, and in November 2026 the Bell Tower closes from the 9th to the 13th and the dome from the 16th to the 20th.

The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore says “there is not, nor will there be, a ‘skip the line’ service”, and it refuses tickets bought from unauthorised sellers. The three tours on the Duomo page come from Nicom Tours, Walks in town and Towns of Italy, all on the Opera’s published 2026 list of authorised partners; GetYourGuide itself is not on that list.

Passes and free Sundays

The Firenze Card costs €85 for 72 hours from the first museum you enter, one entry per museum, but you still book at the Uffizi, the Accademia, Palazzo Vecchio, the Arnolfo Tower and the Brancacci Chapel, and it includes no Duomo monument and no public transport. The Firenze Card guide does the arithmetic. State museums, the Uffizi, the Accademia, Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens among them, are free on the first Sunday of each month, with no reservations and no priority entry that day, except a free online booking for the Vasari Corridor and the Pitti Royal Apartments. The free first Sundays at Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo are for residents only.

Day trips out of the city

The faster direct trains from Santa Maria Novella reach Pisa in about an hour and direct trains reach Siena in about an hour and a half, but San Gimignano has no station of its own: the train goes to Poggibonsi, and a bus, €2.90 on top of the fare, climbs to the old town.

A coach tour joins the towns up in one day. Walkabout Tours’ Siena, San Gimignano and Pisa trip (from $152) leaves from in front of Santa Maria Novella station, is back about 8:30 pm and includes the Siena Cathedral ticket, with lunch at a Chianti winery on the lunch option and the Leaning Tower only if you choose it. My Tour in Italy covers the same three towns from $55 on a 12-hour day, and Ciaoflorence Tours & Travel’s half-day trip to two Chianti wineries starts from $56. Day trips compares them with a Cinque Terre day and a Vespa ride.

Getting around, and when to go

The centre is walkable: Santa Maria Novella station to the Duomo is about 10 to 12 minutes on foot. A bus or tram ticket has cost €2.00 since 1 August 2026, €3.00 from the driver, and lasts 90 minutes. The historic centre is a limited traffic zone watched by plate-reading cameras, and driving in without authorisation brings a steep fine.

August is the hottest month, with an average high of 32.5 °C over 1991-2020, November the wettest, with 118 mm of rain, and July the driest. In the regional tourism data, January and February were the quietest months in both 2024 and 2025, while the busiest moved from July in 2024 to May in 2025. The best time to visit Florence goes month by month.

The planning guides

Each guide takes one question further: Florence in one day, a Florence itinerary, things to do in Florence, free walking tours, the Firenze Card, the Vasari Corridor, Ponte Vecchio, the Boboli Gardens, Piazzale Michelangelo, the best time to visit Florence and the Florence city tours map.