Medici Chapels

Medici Chapels tickets: which one to buy

The ticket covers both chapels attached to San Lorenzo: the Chapel of the Princes, a vast domed octagon lined in coloured marble, and the New Sacristy, Michelangelo's room with the ducal tombs. It is a state museum, so entry is included in some Florence museum passes, and free on the first Sunday of the month, which is also the busiest day. Buying online with a timed slot is worth a small fee in season. Guided tours cost several times the ticket and are worth it only if you want the sculptures read carefully.

Note that the Basilica of San Lorenzo next door and its Laurentian Library, also by Michelangelo, are separate tickets sold at separate doors, and many visitors buy the wrong one; the chapels are entered from Piazza Madonna degli Aldobrandini at the back of the church. Numbers inside are managed and there can be a short wait. Combined tickets with the Bargello and other state museums exist but are sold only at the museums themselves, not online.

Visiting Medici Chapels: what to see

Michelangelo began the New Sacristy in 1520 as a mausoleum for two minor Medici dukes, Giuliano of Nemours and Lorenzo of Urbino, and worked on it intermittently until he left Florence for good in 1534. He designed the room and the sculpture together, in grey pietra serena and white marble, with blank architecture that seems to press inwards. On the tombs the two dukes sit idealised in armour, and below them recline four figures of Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk, unfinished in places and among the most famous nudes in Western art.

Against the third wall stands a Madonna and Child, left rough. A small room below the sacristy, discovered in 1975, has charcoal drawings on the walls attributed to Michelangelo, who is thought to have hidden there in 1530; it is now open in small timed groups. The Chapel of the Princes next door is the opposite in spirit: seventeenth-century, enormous and covered in inlaid hard stone. Michelangelo never finished the scheme: the two magnificent Medici, Lorenzo and Giuliano, were to have tombs of their own and got only the Madonna wall.

Medici Chapels opening hours and the best time to go

Open most days with one or two weekday closures that change by season, from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, with last entry three quarters of an hour before closing. The hours are shorter than most Florence museums and catch people out. The New Sacristy is a small room and a group of thirty fills it, so the first slot or the last hour is better. Light is natural and comes from high windows, which means the sculptures read best in the middle of the day.

Photography without flash is allowed. Allow an hour for both chapels, ninety minutes with the secret room if you have booked it separately. The market of San Lorenzo surrounds the church and is the place to eat afterwards, though the church itself, with Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, deserves its own visit. The Chapel of the Princes is worth ten minutes even if the New Sacristy is your reason for coming, if only for the scale of the marble inlay.