Santa Croce

Santa Croce tickets: which one to buy

One ticket covers the church, the chapels, the cloisters, the Pazzi Chapel and the museum in the old refectory, and it is bought at the door or online for a small saving in queueing. Booking matters only in high summer. An audio guide is available and useful, since the chapels are numerous and the labels are brief. Guided tours with an art historian cost several times the ticket and are worth it if the Giotto frescoes are your reason for coming, because the two chapels in question are behind a rail and need pointing out.

Combined tickets with the leather school behind the church, which has operated in the cloister since 1950, are sold at the desk. Florence's museum cards do not include Santa Croce, which is run by its own foundation, so this is a separate purchase from the Uffizi and the Duomo complex. The piazza outside is free and the facade is best seen from its far end.

Visiting Santa Croce: what to see

Franciscans began the present church in 1294, possibly to a design by Arnolfo di Cambio, and it is the largest Franciscan church in the world, laid out as a wide preaching hall with an open timber roof. It became the burial place of the Florentine great, which is why it is called the Temple of the Italian Glories: Michelangelo near the door, Galileo opposite him, Machiavelli, Rossini, Ghiberti and a cenotaph to Dante, who is buried in Ravenna and whose absence the city has never quite got over.

The Bardi and Peruzzi chapels beside the high altar hold Giotto's frescoes of the lives of St Francis and the two St Johns, painted around 1320 and plastered over in the sixteenth century before being uncovered in the nineteenth. The Cimabue crucifix in the refectory became a symbol of the 1966 flood, which reached five metres here and left it half destroyed; the restoration took ten years. Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel in the cloister is early Renaissance at its purest.

Santa Croce opening hours and the best time to go

Open Monday to Saturday from mid-morning to evening and on Sunday afternoons, with last entry half an hour before closing. Santa Croce is on most walking routes but takes fewer visitors than the Duomo, so it is pleasant even at midday; the quietest hour is the first. Light in the nave is best in the morning through the east windows. The church closes to visitors during services. Dress code is enforced at the door, shoulders and knees covered, and bags are checked.

Photography without flash is allowed. Allow ninety minutes for church, chapels and cloister together. The piazza hosts the calcio storico, a violent Renaissance football tournament, in the last week of June, when the square is boarded over with sand and the church is hard to approach. The leather school at the back of the cloister is free to enter and still teaches the craft, which makes it a better souvenir stop than the stalls outside.