Santa Maria Novella

Santa Maria Novella tickets: which one to buy

One ticket covers the church, the Green Cloister, the Spanish Chapel and the museum rooms, and it is bought at a separate entrance on Piazza della Stazione rather than at the church front on the main square, which catches out most first-time visitors. Booking online saves a queue only in high season. An audio tour is included in some versions. Guided tours with an art historian cost several times the ticket and are worth it for the Masaccio and the fresco cycles, which are dense with fifteenth-century Florentine politics.

The historic pharmacy of Santa Maria Novella, founded by the friars in 1612 and still selling soaps and colognes from painted cabinets, is round the corner on Via della Scala, free to enter and worth twenty minutes. Florence museum cards do not include this church. The museum rooms are included but shut earlier than the church, so see them first if you arrive in the afternoon.

Visiting Santa Maria Novella: what to see

The Dominicans began building in 1278 and the church took two centuries; Leon Battista Alberti added the upper facade in the 1460s, fitting classical geometry over a Gothic front and inventing the scrolled volutes that half the churches in Italy later copied. Inside, Masaccio's Holy Trinity of about 1427 is painted on the left wall in perspective so exact that the fictive chapel appears to open into the masonry; it is the first monumental Renaissance painting to use the technique and remains startling. Giotto's crucifix hangs in the nave.

Ghirlandaio frescoed the choir chapel in the 1480s with the lives of the Virgin and the Baptist set in contemporary Florentine interiors, with the young Michelangelo reputedly among his assistants. The Spanish Chapel off the Green Cloister carries a vast painted programme of the triumph of the Dominican order, with dogs of the Lord chasing heretical wolves. Brunelleschi's wooden crucifix hangs in the Gondi chapel, carved as a rebuke to Donatello's version in Santa Croce, which he said looked like a peasant on the cross.

Santa Maria Novella opening hours and the best time to go

Open Monday to Saturday from mid-morning to evening and on Sunday afternoons, with shorter winter hours and last admission three quarters of an hour before closing. The church is next to the main railway station and is the first thing many visitors see in Florence, yet it takes a fraction of the crowds of the Duomo. Mornings are quietest. The Holy Trinity is on the north wall and needs artificial light, which is on a timer.

Dress code is enforced, shoulders and knees covered. Photography without flash is allowed. Allow ninety minutes for everything. The cloisters are cool in summer and are where most visitors end up sitting. The square in front was used for chariot races in the sixteenth century, and the two marble obelisks that marked the turns are still standing.