Florence, in one walk

What's inside

• 01Baptistery of San GiovanniFor six hundred years Florence was certain this was a Roman temple to Mars. Excavation under the floor proved the city wrong about its own oldest building17 min
• 02Florence CathedralBegun in 1296 with no known way to roof it, and left open to the sky for about forty years while the city waited for someone to solve it20 min
• 03Piazza della SignoriaThe square is the footprint of houses pulled down after a civil war, and a plaque in the paving marks where Savonarola was hanged and burned18 min
• 04Ponte VecchioButchers held these shops until a grand duke built a private corridor over the top and issued a decree that is still in force four centuries later17 min

There is also a free introduction to the city — the florin, the wool guilds, the Roman grid still visible around Piazza della Repubblica, and why the Medici are credited with rather more of this than they built.

The walk

Start at the Baptistery, the octagon in Piazza del Duomo. Turn round for the cathedral — it is three metres away. Walk three hundred metres south to Piazza della Signoria. Then four hundred more, through the Uffizi courtyard, to the Ponte Vecchio.

That is the whole route. It is flat, it takes about fifteen minutes to walk without stopping, and every stop on it is free to stand at. You need no ticket to hear any of this guide.

Why the stops run fifteen minutes instead of ninety seconds

Each landmark begins as a written dossier — earliest history, construction, architecture, archaeology, the people, the myths, and what is actually known — researched and written out before a word is narrated.

Every claim in that dossier carries a confidence rating, and that rating survives into the guide. Florence needs this more than most cities. A great deal of what gets repeated here comes from Giorgio Vasari, who published the first history of Renaissance art in 1550, told it as a Florentine triumph, and was a Florentine court painter on the Medici payroll at the time. He is the foundational source and he is not a disinterested one. Where something is only a story, the guide says so.

Four things this guide will tell you that the square will not

• The Baptistery doors are copies. The 1966 flood burst them open and tore five panels off the Gates of Paradise. Every original is now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, a five-minute walk across the same square, and almost nobody makes it.
• The cathedral façade is Victorian. Arnolfo di Cambio's front was demolished in 1587 and the building stood with a bare brick face for nearly three hundred years. What you photograph was built between 1876 and 1887.
• That is not Michelangelo's David. The original was moved indoors in 1873 after 369 years outside. The copy went up in 1910.
• The Ponte Vecchio was a meat market. The butchers threw their waste into the Arno. The jewellers arrived by decree in the 1590s, and the decree has never been repealed.

How it works on the day

Download Florence over wi-fi before you go. After that the whole guide plays on aeroplane mode — in the queue, inside the Baptistery, and on roaming you would rather not pay for.

Start a stop, lock the phone and put it in your pocket. It keeps playing, and you can pause or skip from your headphones or the lock screen. The app can also show you an optional list of landmarks within about a kilometre, which in a centre this compact means all of them at once. Decline that permission and everything else still works.

Walking it

The four are a route, and the order is deliberate: it runs north to south and it also runs oldest to newest, which is unusual and useful. Play them in any order you like, though — nothing in the guide assumes you have heard another stop first.