Tripe, Truffles and Wine Windows: A Food Lover's Walk Through Florence

From a convent-turned-prison and the market of Sant'Ambrogio to Vasari's fish loggia, the gelato legend, historic cafés, a wine window and the great iron hall of the Mercato Centrale

Florence · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Le Murate: Convent, Prison, Piazza

Piazza delle Murate, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Step into the long courtyard of Le Murate and count the rows of small, regular windows above the café tables. Students with laptops, toddlers on scooters, someone carrying shopping home... and yet each of those little windows was once a cell. You are standing inside what was, for well over a century, the most feared address in Florence.

The name tells the oldest part of the story. Le Murate means the walled-in women. In the fourteenth century a handful of devout women had themselves enclosed in a tiny hermitage on the old Rubaconte bridge, the one we now call Ponte alle Grazie, living on bread and alms passed through a small opening. Their community grew, and in the early fifteenth century they moved here, to Via Ghibellina, and became one of the richest convents in the city.

Two famous women passed through these walls. Caterina Sforza, the countess of Forlì who had stood up to Cesare Borgia, ended her days in Florence and was buried in the convent church in 1509. She left behind a manuscript of experiments, hundreds of recipes for medicines, perfumes and cosmetics. And during the siege of 1529 a little girl of the Medici family, Catherine, was kept here as a political hostage, and grew fond of the nuns. She would become queen of France, and a stubborn legend says she taught the French how to cook. Historians are sceptical... but Florentines still enjoy telling it.

In the nineteenth century the nuns were gone and the convent became the city prison. Under Fascism and the German occupation, political prisoners and partisans were locked in these cells. The prison only closed in 1985, when the inmates were moved to a new jail on the edge of town, and the buildings stood empty for years.

Then came one of the most interesting urban rescues in Florence: homes, a public square and a literary café, some of its tables set inside the old cells. Food that once came through a hatch is now served in the open air, which is a fine way to begin a walk about eating. Now head a few steps north to the iron-and-glass hall of the Sant'Ambrogio market.
2. Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio

Piazza Lorenzo Ghiberti, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy

Follow your nose: oranges, damp earth still clinging to the leeks, coffee from a bar counter, something frying. In front of you rises a long hall of green-painted cast iron and glass, and all around it a ring of stalls under awnings, piled with whatever the hills around Florence are producing this week. This is Sant'Ambrogio, the market where Florentines actually do their shopping.

The hall opened in 1873, and it was designed by Giuseppe Mengoni, the same engineer who built the great central market you will reach at the end of this walk. Florence had just been capital of Italy and wanted to look modern, clean and European, with iron markets like those of Paris. Mengoni is better known for the glass-roofed Galleria in Milan. He fell from its scaffolding in 1877, just before it was officially finished.

Inside you will find butchers, cheese counters, bakers and tripe sellers. Outside, the produce changes with the calendar. Black cabbage, cavolo nero, after the first frost. Small purple artichokes in spring. Tomatoes and fat yellow peppers in summer. Porcini and chestnuts in autumn. Tuscan cooking is famously built on very few things, chosen well and cooked simply.

And the rule that holds it all together is this: you never throw bread away. Stale bread is soaked and mixed with tomato and basil for pappa al pomodoro, torn into a summer salad for panzanella, or layered with beans and black cabbage for ribollita, the reboiled soup that tastes better on the second day than on the first. Peasant food, born of thrift, and now on menus around the world.

Notice how the ring of stalls spills out into the open air. That is how Florence sold food for centuries, in squares and under stone loggias, long before anybody built iron halls. One of those old loggias survives just round the corner. Walk west into Piazza dei Ciompi, and look for the arches built for selling fish.
3. Piazza dei Ciompi & Vasari's Loggia del Pesce

Piazza dei Ciompi, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Along one side of this square runs a graceful row of grey stone arches with round medallions above them, so elegant you might take it for the porch of a church. It was built for something much smellier. This is the Loggia del Pesce, the fish market.

Its architect was Giorgio Vasari, the painter, builder and first great art historian, who designed it in 1567 for Duke Cosimo de' Medici. It did not stand here then. It stood in the Mercato Vecchio, the old market in the very centre of town, and its job was to gather the fishmongers into one tidy, controlled place. In a Catholic city with so many meatless days a year, fish was serious business, and freshness was policed by strict rules.

Then, in the 1880s, the city decided that the old centre was too crowded, too poor and too unhealthy, and demolished the whole market district. The loggia was taken apart stone by stone, each piece numbered, and put into storage. For decades it simply did not exist. Only in the 1950s was it reassembled in this square, where it never stood before. So one of the most Renaissance things you will see today has only been in this spot for about seventy years.

The square has its own story of hunger. The ciompi were the wool carders, the lowest and worst-paid workers of the great wool industry. In 1378 they rose up, demanded the right to their own guild, and for a few dizzy weeks one of them, Michele di Lando, sat at the head of the government. The revolt was crushed, but the name of the poorest workers of Florence stayed on this square.

Before you leave, look at the medallions above the arches once more and imagine them over barrels of eels and baskets of river fish. Now walk west along Via Pietrapiana and then the handsome Borgo degli Albizi, to the corner of Via del Proconsolo, where an unfinished palace hides the story of gelato.
4. Palazzo Nonfinito & the Buontalenti Gelato Legend

Via del Proconsolo 12, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Stop at the corner where Borgo degli Albizi meets Via del Proconsolo and look at the big stone palace with heavy, sculpted window frames. Florentines call it the Palazzo Nonfinito, the Unfinished Palace, and for once a nickname tells the plain truth.

It was begun in 1593 for Alessandro Strozzi, and the first architect was Bernardo Buontalenti. Several others took turns after him, and the building never received the completion it was designed for. Since the twentieth century it has housed the city's museum of anthropology, founded in 1869 by the scientist Paolo Mantegazza, the oldest of its kind in Italy.

Buontalenti himself was the Medici's all-round genius. He built villas and fortresses, designed garden grottoes, and invented stage machinery for court spectacles, clouds that descended, seas that moved. Florentines nicknamed him Bernardo delle Girandole, Bernardo of the Catherine wheels, because nobody staged fireworks like him.

And then there is the legend. The story goes that for a Medici banquet Buontalenti served a frozen cream of milk, honey, egg yolks and a dash of wine, chilled with the snow and ice the court kept through the summer in deep, straw-lined ice houses. Historians will tell you that iced drinks and sorbets were already known, and that nobody can name the day gelato was born. But by the late sixteenth century Italian natural philosophers had described the trick that made it possible: mix salt or saltpetre into crushed ice, and it becomes cold enough to freeze a jug of wine.

Legend or not, walk into almost any gelateria in Florence and you will find a pale, egg-rich flavour called crema Buontalenti. The city has decided who invented ice cream, and it is not taking questions. Now head south down Via del Proconsolo, past the fortress-like Bargello, and on to the corner of Via dei Neri, where Florence once sold its grain.
5. Loggia del Grano & the Saltless Bread

Via dei Neri, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

On the corner of Via dei Neri, find the stone building with a marble bust of a young duke gazing down over a small fountain, whose water pours from the mouth of a grotesque face. This is the Loggia del Grano, the grain market, built in 1619 by Giulio Parigi for Grand Duke Cosimo the Second.

Under its arches grain from the countryside was measured and sold. That sounds dull until you remember that in a city of tens of thousands, a bad harvest meant hunger, and hunger meant riots. Florence had magistrates whose whole job was to stock grain and keep the price of bread from exploding. Whoever controlled the bread controlled the streets... and the Medici knew it.

Now, bread. When you eat in Florence, you may think the baker forgot something. Tuscan bread is made without salt. There are several stories. One says that in the twelfth century Pisa, the great rival, blocked the salt coming up the Arno. Another blames a heavy tax on salt. Nobody can prove either. But the habit is old enough that Dante, exiled from Florence, wrote in his Paradiso how salty another man's bread tastes. For a Florentine, even the bread of exile was too salty.

The saltless loaf makes sense at the table. It is the quiet partner of salty prosciutto, aged pecorino and the black-cabbage soups, and it goes stale in a way that is perfect for soaking. These streets know water too. In the flood of the fourth of November 1966, the Arno poured through this whole quarter, and plaques on the walls nearby still mark how high it rose, far above a person's head.

Next comes coffee and cake, and a square with a split personality. Walk past the back of Palazzo Vecchio, cross Piazza della Signoria, and follow Via dei Calzaiuoli north until a great arch opens on your left into Piazza della Repubblica.
6. Piazza della Repubblica: Caffè Gilli & Giubbe Rosse

Piazza della Repubblica, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand by the old carousel and turn slowly round. Big arcades, a triumphal arch, wide pavements, café terraces... it looks more like Turin or Paris than like the rest of Florence, and that is exactly the point.

Under your feet lies the heart of Roman Florentia, where its two main streets crossed, and the stone column with the statue of Abundance marks that spot. For centuries this was the Mercato Vecchio, a maze of butchers, poulterers, fishmongers and taverns, and next to it the walled Jewish ghetto. In the 1880s and 1890s the whole quarter was demolished. The inscription on the arch boasts that the ancient centre was restored from centuries of squalor to new life. Many Florentines, then and now, would call it a loss.

Caffè Gilli is older than the square itself. It was founded in 1733 by a family from Switzerland as a shop of sweet breads, and moved here once the new buildings went up. Do as Florentines do: stand at the bar, order a coffee, drink it in a few sips, and point at a pastry. In winter, the thick hot chocolate is close to a pudding.

Across the square is the Caffè Giubbe Rosse, the Red Jackets, opened in the 1890s by German brothers whose waiters wore red jackets in the Viennese style. It is said that Florentines could not pronounce the owners' German name, so they named the place after the jackets. It became the living room of the Florentine avant-garde. In 1911, the story goes, Futurists from Milan came down by train to answer a bad review of their exhibition with their fists, right at these tables. Within two years, the former enemies were writing for the same magazine.

So the square tells you two things about Florence: it can be ruthless with its past, and it never stops arguing over a cup of coffee. Now leave by the south-west corner into Via Porta Rossa, to a medieval house that kept its kitchen on the top floor.
7. Palazzo Davanzati: The Kitchen at the Top

Via Porta Rossa 13, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

On Via Porta Rossa, find the tall, narrow palace with three rows of windows, iron rings and hooks across the stone, and an open loggia right under the roof. The rings held poles for banners, for torches, for laundry, and for the hunting birds of the household.

It was built in the fourteenth century by the Davizzi, a merchant family, and in 1578 it passed to Bernardo Davanzati, a man of letters remembered for translating the Roman historian Tacitus. Early in the twentieth century an antiques dealer, Elia Volpi, bought it, restored it and filled it with furniture, and today it is the Museum of the Old Florentine House, the best place in the city to see how a rich family really lived.

Here is the surprise: the kitchen is at the top. Fire was the great terror of a medieval city, and smoke and cooking smells were not wanted in the rooms where guests were received. So the hearth went upstairs, close to the roof, where the smoke could escape and a fire would do the least damage. Servants carried wood and food up the stairs... but not water. A shaft from the well in the courtyard rose through every floor, so with a rope and a bucket each storey could draw its own. Fourteenth-century plumbing, and a real luxury.

Imagine the household at table. The wine came from the family's own farms in the countryside, the bread was unsalted, and meat was a sign of status, served on feast days with spices brought by Florentine merchants from the other side of the Mediterranean. Upstairs, the walls are painted to look as if they were hung with rich fabrics: one room with parrots, and a bedroom with a tragic love story from a French romance.

From the kitchen at the top, we go to a shop that has been feeding elegant Florence for well over a century. Continue west along Via Porta Rossa to the wide Via de' Tornabuoni, and turn right, walking north between the fashion windows.
8. Via de' Tornabuoni & Procacci's Truffle Rolls

Via de' Tornabuoni 64r, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

You are on Via de' Tornabuoni, the most elegant street in Florence, all polished stone palaces and the big names of fashion. Between the designer windows, look for a small, old-fashioned shop front with jars and bottles behind the glass. That is Procacci, and it has been here since 1885.

It was opened by Leopoldo Procacci as a fine-food shop, and it built its reputation on one tiny thing: a soft little bread roll, filled with butter blended with truffle. A couple of those and a glass of white wine became the afternoon ritual of Florentine society, a snack for ladies coming from the dressmaker and gentlemen coming from the bank.

Truffles are serious business in Tuscany. The most precious, the white truffle, is found in autumn in the woods around San Miniato, between Florence and Pisa, by men who go out with trained dogs, often at night, and never tell anyone where their best spots are. In San Miniato they still tell the story of a giant white truffle of more than two kilos, found in 1954 and sent as a gift to President Eisenhower.

The street itself is named after the Tornabuoni, an old merchant family. Lucrezia Tornabuoni was the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a poet, a businesswoman and one of the shrewdest minds in the Medici house. In the nineteenth century this became the street of the foreign colony, of English bankers, tea rooms and reading rooms. The Gabinetto Vieusseux, the famous lending library and reading room founded in 1819, opened nearby, and every visiting writer seemed to pass through it.

Florentines will tell you that the truffle roll is not food, it is punctuation, a pause in the day. Now walk the last stretch north to the top of the street, where it opens into a little square and a severe stone palace with a very small door in its façade.
9. Palazzo Antinori & the Wine Window

Piazza degli Antinori 3, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

The street widens into the small Piazza degli Antinori, and in front of you stands a severe Renaissance palace of rough-cut stone. Now lower your eyes. Near the great door, at about waist height, there is a tiny arched opening framed in stone, no bigger than a book. It is a buchetta del vino, a wine window.

The palace was built in the 1460s and bought in 1506 by the Antinori, and here is the astonishing part. The family has been in the wine trade since 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the vintners' guild of Florence. More than twenty-five generations later, the same name is still on bottles of Chianti and Tuscan reds sold around the world.

From the sixteenth century, the Medici rulers allowed noble families to sell wine from their country estates directly from their town palaces, without a middleman. So they cut little windows into their walls. You knocked, a servant inside opened the wooden shutter, took your empty flask and handed it back full. No tavern, no bill, no conversation. Well over a hundred of these windows have been counted in the old city, most of them bricked up or painted over, easy to miss once you stop looking down.

They came into their own during the plague of 1630. A Florentine writer of the time, Francesco Rondinelli, described wine being passed through the windows without contact, and payment taken on a metal tray and disinfected with vinegar. Nearly four centuries later, in 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, some of these windows opened again, handing out wine, coffee and even gelato to customers standing at a safe distance.

It is hard to think of a better symbol of Florence: a city that keeps its medieval solutions in the wall, just in case. Now make your way north-east through the narrow streets to the big square of San Lorenzo, where a saint who died on a gridiron rules over the city's most famous steak.
10. Piazza San Lorenzo & the Bistecca Legend

Piazza San Lorenzo, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Make your way into the crowded square of San Lorenzo: leather stalls, the rough, never-finished stone face of the old church to one side, and on a tall carved pedestal by Baccio Bandinelli, a seated soldier in marble, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, father of the first grand duke. Keep an eye on your bag, and an ear open for the stallholders.

Saint Lawrence, San Lorenzo, was a deacon of Rome martyred in the year 258, by tradition roasted alive on a gridiron. The legend says that halfway through he told his executioners to turn him over, because that side was done. With a story like that, it is no surprise that he became the patron saint of cooks. His feast falls on the tenth of August, and this neighbourhood still celebrates it in the square.

Now for Florence's favourite food legend. It is said that on the saint's feast the Medici had bonfires lit here and roasted great quantities of beef for the people. English travellers in the crowd shouted for beef steak, beef steak... and the Florentines turned the cry into bistecca. The word really does come from the English, though nobody can show it happened on this square.

A true bistecca alla fiorentina is a T-bone with the fillet on one side and the sirloin on the other, traditionally from the white Chianina cattle of the Val di Chiana. It is cut at least three fingers thick, often over a kilo, grilled over glowing embers until charred outside and red inside, and salted only at the end. Ask for it well done, and the waiter may look at you with real sorrow.

In 2001, when European rules against mad cow disease banned beef on the bone from older cattle, Tuscans staged mock funerals for the bistecca. It took several years before the T-bone returned to Florentine grills, and it was celebrated like a homecoming. Now walk up past the leather stalls to the great hall of iron and glass at the end of the street.
11. Mercato Centrale: Lampredotto & Tripe

Piazza del Mercato Centrale, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Here it is: a vast hall of cast iron and glass on a stone base, with great arched windows and a roof that lets in the daylight. Step inside, and the noise hits you first, then the smell of cheese, cured ham, coffee and something simmering.

This is the Mercato Centrale, designed by Giuseppe Mengoni, the same engineer as the Sant'Ambrogio market where you started, and opened in 1874. It was built to replace the old market that was being demolished at the heart of the city, and it was the height of modernity, iron and glass in the style of the great halls of Paris. The ground floor is still a working market of butchers, cheesemongers and greengrocers. The upper floor was reborn as a food hall in 2014.

And now the dish that separates the visitors from the Florentines: lampredotto. It is the fourth stomach of the cow, named, people say, because its dark folds resemble the lamprey, an eel-like fish. It is simmered for hours in a broth with tomato, onion, celery and parsley, then sliced on a wooden board, stuffed into a round roll whose top has been dipped in the broth, and finished with green parsley sauce and a few drops of chilli oil.

For centuries the trippai, the tripe sellers, have fed this city from stalls and carts. This was the lunch of porters, market workers and builders, cheap, hot and nourishing, made from the parts of the animal the rich would not touch. Its cousin is trippa alla fiorentina, tripe stewed with tomato and served with grated cheese. Try one standing up, with a glass of red, and you have eaten like a real Florentine.

Think back over the walk: walled nuns living on bread, Vasari's fish loggia, the saltless loaf, a cream frozen for the Medici, coffee at the bar, truffle rolls, wine passed through a hole in the wall, and a steak named by the English. Florence is usually told through its paintings, but its kitchens tell the same story... with more garlic. Buon appetito.