Duomo Complex & City Walking Guided Tour w/Cupola Entry Tickets

Explore the key landmarks on this comprehensive tour of the Duomo Complex in Florence. This tour gives you the opportunity to fully explore all elements of the Duomo Complex. Once you've met with our guide, the guide will take you on a tour of the Piazza del Duomo and explain to you about the fascinating religious center. After seeing the Duomo from all sides of the square you will access the octagonal Baptistery of St. John in Florence. The guide will show you that the Baptistery is renowned for its magnificent golden mosaic ceiling and striking bronze doors famously called the Gates of Paradise.

Later you will visit the magnificent Duomo Museum in Florence. The museum houses over 700 Middle-Age and Renaissance masterpieces, including Michelangelo's Pietà Bandini. It also has incredible masterpieces like the gates of the Baptistery, Donatello’s sculptures, and the original dome’s wooden scaffoldings. The guide will also show you some of the most famous works of art done by Michelangelo and Donatello. As your tour comes to a halt, your guide will drop you off at the entrance to the Cupola Dome a showstopper but the only way to see the inside of the dome up close and enjoy the extraordinary view of Florence is to climb its 463 steps (there is no elevator).

Cupola which was designed and built by Filippo Brunelleschi has tight corridors to climb your way up (and down). This is because the workmen who built the cathedral for maintenance were never thought of as being open to the public. On the dome's interior, you can admire Giorgio Vasari's frescoes of the Last Judgment (1572-9) on your way up to the top Look down and on the base, just above the drum, you'll see that Baccio D'Angelo began adding a balcony in 1507 and how one of the eight sides was unfinished, and to this day the other seven sides remain rough brick! Once you climb to the top of the Cupola, you will be enchanted by the panoramic view of the Florence city in front of your eyes. After you visit the Cupola with your pre-reserved timed ticket, you have the chance to also visit the interior of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, and Santa Reparata and to climb Giotto's Bell Tower at your own pace and time.

From the point of the meeting, the guide will give you an insight of the history of this Renaissance city and how this incredible cultural movement of the Renaissance transformed not only Florence but eventually the rest of Europe. The guide will start off with Piazza Della Republica, the main square of Florence that marks the center of the City. After a little talk of history & the changes of Piazza Republica since its origin, you will walk straight to the marvelous piece of art, the Piazza Della Duomo. A showstopper of Filippo Brunelleschi, Giotto, Arnolfo & Francesco Talenti.

Walk passing the Duomo Square the guide will lead you straight through the old buildings and some of the historical landmarks of Florence to Palazzo Vecchio, where the David’s’ sculpture (the original is in the Galleria dell'Accademia) by Michelangelo is placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio as a symbol of the Republic's defiance of the tyrannical Medici.

Afterward, as you walk past the Palazzo Vecchio, the guide will explain you about the Uffizi Gallery, one of the greatest museums of the world, and then you will reach the most famous old bridge of Florence known as “Ponte Vecchio”.

Your next stop is Palazzo Pitti, the enormous palace of Florence's largest architectural monuments of Filippo Brunelleschi and the household of Pitti Family, later of the Medici’s’.

Finally, the guide will talk you through the artists, architects, thinkers, and political figures who led to the Renaissance and were born on the fertile soil in and around Florence, within the same century. The tour takes about one and a half hours, enough time to help you understand the uniqueness and beauty of Florence city.