How to Visit the Vasari Corridor

There is no stand-alone daytime ticket for the Vasari Corridor. You buy it with an Uffizi ticket, €43 on the day or €47 in advance in 2026, or add it to an Uffizi ticket, a PassePartout or a Firenze Card as a €20 supplement. The visit runs one way, from the Uffizi over Ponte Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti, in timed groups of 25 visitors with two museum staff who accompany the group but do not guide it, and the walk takes about 45 minutes. Until 20 November 2026 it also opens on Friday evenings, for €20 (€24 bought in advance).

Nobody guides you inside the corridor, and the listing below says guides may not give explanations there. What a tour can do is guide you through the Uffizi first and line up the corridor slot at the right time afterwards. The calendar below is “Uffizi Small Group Tour + Optional Vasari Corridor Access”, run by Florence with Locals Group Tours: a 1.5-hour guided tour of the Uffizi for at most nine people, with a licensed guide and the Uffizi entrance included, plus the corridor if you choose that option when you book. The guide meets you in front of the Uffizi and leaves you at the corridor entrance inside the museum. From there the corridor is the museum’s accompanied visit, at a slot about two hours after the tour starts (an 8:30 tour enters at about 10:45), so allow around four hours in all.

It starts from $50 as of October 2026. That is the listing’s starting price, and the price with the corridor shows when you pick that option. It is rated 4.6 from 145 reviews, with free cancellation up to 24 hours before. The operator’s own advice is worth repeating: if an unhurried visit to the Uffizi matters more to you, take the tour without the corridor, because the corridor ends across the river and you cannot go back in.

What’s special about the Vasari Corridor?

Giorgio Vasari built it in 1565 for Cosimo I de’ Medici, and it runs from the Uffizi over the shops of Ponte Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti. The Uffizi says the Medici used it “to reach Palazzo Vecchio from Pitti Palace undisturbed and without running risks to their safety”. The museum’s Italian ticket page calls it the most beautiful “aerial” route in the world, which is the museum’s claim to make.

It reopened on 21 December 2024, after eight years closed for work to bring it up to current safety rules. The work began in 2022 and cost around €10 million, plus a million dollars donated in 2023 by the US entrepreneur Skip Avansino. The Uffizi describes the result as a corridor “restored today to its original bareness”, “a simple ‘air tunnel’”. The self-portraits that once hung along it were moved out because, the museum says, the changes in climate inside risked damaging them. What you walk through now is the corridor itself, with ramps, platforms and lifts that make it accessible to all, and toilets at the end.

How long is it? The Uffizi’s own pages put it at anywhere from about 750 metres to a kilometre.

The tickets in 2026

Buy from the Uffizi’s own ticket platform, tickets.uffizi.it. You can buy at most five corridor tickets at a time, even for different dates, and each name has to match the visitor’s ID. On the free first Sunday of the month the corridor opens only to visitors who booked online, at no extra cost, while the slots last.

Booking the supplement: leave two hours

The Uffizi’s own rules give two minimum gaps between your Uffizi entry and your corridor slot. One says at least two hours, or you sign a form at the entrance accepting that you will have less time in the gallery; another asks for at least 30 minutes, the time it takes to reach the meeting point. The Firenze Card’s help page says at least 45 minutes and recommends two hours. Two hours is the safe choice, and it is what the combined ticket builds in. You always go into the Uffizi first: a corridor slot cannot come before your Uffizi entry.

The corridor starts at the Room D19 meeting point, the small Venetian chapel on the first floor of the Uffizi. Be there five minutes before your slot, because latecomers lose the right to enter.

On the day

The corridor opens Tuesday to Sunday. The first group goes in at 10:15 am and the last leaves at 4:45 pm, and it shares the Uffizi’s closing days: Mondays, 1 January and 25 December. It also opens on the museum’s special open days, unless they fall on a Monday.

No bulky items go in: no suitcases of any size, no backpacks or rucksacks, no large umbrellas. A small umbrella is allowed if it fits in a pocket or a handbag. Since you do not come back through the Uffizi, keep your coat and anything else you need with you rather than in the Uffizi’s cloakroom. Photos are fine for personal use without professional equipment; video is not. The group stays together, and nobody may leave it along the way.

At the far end, groups leave by a door next to the Buontalenti Grotto and are walked to the Ammannati courtyard of Palazzo Pitti without stopping in the Boboli Gardens. With a ticket for Boboli or the Pitti museums you can carry on from there; everyone else heads for the exit, though the café and toilets in the courtyard are open to all. The Uffizi will not sell a Boboli ticket in the same purchase if your corridor exit falls less than an hour and a half before the garden closes, and Boboli Gardens has the garden’s hours and prices.

Wheelchairs weighing more than 230 kg with the user, or longer than 120 cm, are not admitted. Courtesy wheelchairs and walkers can be picked up at Door 1 while they last.

Friday evenings until 20 November 2026

Every Friday from 3 July to 20 November 2026 the corridor opens from 7 pm to 11 pm, with the last admission at 9:50 pm. The “Special Openings” ticket costs €20 on the day or €24 in advance. It takes you through the Uffizi to the corridor but does not let you visit any part of the gallery. Meet at the entrance in Piazzale degli Uffizi next to the Loggia dei Lanzi at least 10 minutes before your slot; you come out through the Rondò di Bacco gate. If the lifting platform is out of order, the ticket is refunded.

Did the Medici live in Palazzo Vecchio?

Yes, for a time. MUS.E, the Comune’s museum foundation, says that in the 16th century Palazzo Vecchio was the residence of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, his wife Eleonora of Toledo and their eleven children. Cosimo moved his household into the seat of government and had it turned into a ducal palace. Palazzo Pitti was bought in 1550 and became the new grand-ducal residence. The corridor joined the two by way of the Uffizi, and the city’s tourism site describes it as the passage that let the Medici “move easily between Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti”. Palazzo Vecchio’s museum costs €18 in 2026 and its Arnolfo Tower €20.

What else did Vasari build and paint?

Vasari was a painter, an architect and a writer: MUS.E introduces him as the author of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. In Florence his name is on:

• The Uffizi itself. Cosimo I commissioned him shortly after 1550 to bring the city’s magistrates, the “uffizi” or offices, under one roof. Both men died in 1574, and Francesco I and the architect Bernardo Buontalenti finished it.
• Palazzo Vecchio’s transformation from the seat of government into a ducal palace, a building site he took charge of in 1555.
• The frescoes inside Brunelleschi’s dome, about 3,600 square metres, painted by Vasari and Federico Zuccari. The dome-climb listing on the Duomo page points out that the climb passes close to them.
• A nursery he designed in the Boboli Gardens, replaced from 1583 by Buontalenti’s grotto, the same grotto where the corridor’s groups come out.

Is the Uffizi worth it?

It depends what you came to see. The city’s tourism site calls it the most visited painting gallery in Italy, and the guided tours on the Uffizi page build their routes around Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo’s Annunciation and Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. In 2026 entry costs €25 on the day or €29 in advance, or €16 (€20 in advance) for entry from 4 pm, and the gallery opens from 8:15 am to 6:30 pm, Tuesday to Sunday. Tickets are named and checked against ID: no match means no entry and no refund. A few rooms are closed for works. If the one thing you want is Michelangelo’s David, that is at the Accademia, and the David and Accademia page covers it. For both and more, the Firenze Card guide does the sums, and Ponte Vecchio covers the bridge the corridor crosses.

Sources: the Gallerie degli Uffizi (corridor, rules, tickets and news pages), Firenzecard, MUS.E, the Comune di Firenze’s tourism site and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore; tour details from the listing. Checked October 2026.