Santo Spirito, Florence

Santo Spirito, Florence tickets: which one to buy

The church is free to enter. A small ticket covers the sacristy and the refectory museum, which holds a rare eleventh-century Last Supper fresco and a collection of Romanesque sculpture. The wooden crucifix attributed to the young Michelangelo, carved when he was about seventeen in exchange for permission to dissect bodies in the convent hospital, is in the sacristy and is the reason most people pay.

Guided tours of the Oltrarno include Santo Spirito and cost several times that. The basilica is on its own square across the Arno, ten minutes from the Ponte Vecchio, in a quarter of workshops and bars that is the least touristic part of central Florence. Nothing needs booking. The refectory museum is entered from the far left of the facade and is easy to miss.

Visiting Santo Spirito, Florence: what to see

Augustinians began building here in 1250 and rebuilt entirely from 1444 to a design by Brunelleschi, who died two years into the work; it is his last church and, in the judgement of most historians, his most complete statement. The plan is a Latin cross ringed by thirty-eight semicircular chapels, and the colonnade of grey stone columns runs unbroken round the whole interior, so that the space reads as a single continuous system. The facade was never finished and remains a blank yellow wall, which locals are fond of.

Inside are altarpieces by Filippino Lippi and Botticini and a sacristy by Giuliano da Sangallo. The square outside has a market in the morning and fills with drinkers in the evening, and the contrast between the plain front and the crowd below it is part of the character of the quarter. The high altar of 1608, a baroque canopy in pietra dura, was inserted against Brunelleschi's scheme and has been controversial ever since. Brunelleschi intended four doors on the facade to match the aisles and the plan was overruled after his death, one of several changes that his pupils fought over for decades.

Santo Spirito, Florence opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily with a long break in the middle of the day and a shorter Sunday schedule; the sacristy and museum keep their own hours and close in the early afternoon. The interior is bright and even, so any hour works. Florence is crowded from April to October, but the Oltrarno holds fewer visitors than the centre. The market on the square runs on weekday mornings and a flea market on the second Sunday of the month.

Dress code is applied. Photography without flash is allowed. Allow forty minutes with the sacristy. Santa Maria del Carmine with the Brancacci chapel is five minutes away and needs a booked ticket. The square is one of the few places in central Florence where locals outnumber visitors after dark. Michelangelo's crucifix is displayed in the sacristy under low light, and the attribution was only accepted in the 1960s.