Uffizi or Accademia: which to book, and why

Two museums, two jobs

The Accademia is built around one sculpture, and the walk up the hall towards it is the visit. People go, they stand, they are affected by it, they leave. That is a legitimate morning and the museum makes no pretence of being anything else. The Uffizi is the other kind of institution: a long chronological argument about how Italian painting got from gold-ground panels to Caravaggio, told over two floors, and it will absorb as much time as you give it. Our route through the second of those is on Uffizi highlights.

If you have one morning

Choose by what you want to have looked at, not by which museum sounds more important. One sculpture you will remember for twenty years, or a building full of paintings you will remember in fragments. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is doing both properly in the same morning and arriving at the second one too tired to look at it, which is the standard Florence mistake. A realistic shape for the day is on how long it takes.

If the corridor is the point

Then the Uffizi decides itself. The corridor is entered from Room D19 on the gallery’s first floor and exits into the Boboli Gardens on the other side of the Arno, so booking the corridor books the gallery with it. The Accademia becomes a separate errand on a separate day, a short walk north, and that is a far easier plan than wedging it into the same slot.

Doing both

Order barely matters. Geography does. The corridor drops you at the Pitti end of the city and the Accademia sits north of the Duomo, so doing them on one day means crossing the river twice with tired legs. Put the Accademia on the morning you are not walking the corridor. Where everything actually sits is on how to get there.

Frequently asked questions