The Medici Quarter of Florence: Palaces, Tombs and Rivals from San Lorenzo to Santa Maria Novella

Walk through the neighbourhood the Medici made their own: Cosimo's palace and the Magi Chapel, Michelangelo's tombs, a Dominican pharmacy, Botticelli's grave and the palaces of the families who married, rivalled and plotted against them

Florence · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Palazzo Medici Riccardi & the Magi Chapel

Via Camillo Cavour 3, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand on Via Cavour, the street Florentines once called Via Larga, and look at the massive palace on the corner. At street level the stones are rough, almost raw boulders; on the floor above they are smoother; at the top they are smooth, under a colossal overhanging cornice. Strength below, refinement above. That is the Medici, explained in masonry.

Cosimo de' Medici, the banker remembered as Cosimo the Elder, had the palace built from 1444 by his architect Michelozzo. Vasari tells a story that Brunelleschi offered him a far grander design, and that Cosimo turned it down because in Florence envy was more dangerous than any army... and that Brunelleschi smashed his model in a rage. Cosimo never held a title. He ran the Republic from his bank and from this house, through friends placed in office.

Upstairs hides a jewel box, the Chapel of the Magi, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in 1459. The three kings ride across the Tuscan hills in a dazzling procession of horses, falcons, hunting leopards and courtiers in brocade. Scholars have spotted Medici family members among the riders, and Benozzo himself, who wrote his name on his own cap. The pageant also recalls the great church council of 1439, when the Byzantine emperor came to Florence to try to heal the split between East and West.

Lorenzo the Magnificent grew up in these rooms, filled them with poets and philosophers, and took in a teenage Michelangelo, who ate at the family table. And the corner where you are standing was once an open loggia. It was walled up in the early 1500s, and its so-called kneeling windows, resting on big stone brackets, are attributed to Michelangelo.

In 1659 the Medici sold the palace to the Riccardi family, who lengthened it, and that is why it carries both names. Today it is the seat of the local government, still a palace of power. Now walk round the corner, along the side of the palace, to the family church with its bare brick front.
2. Basilica di San Lorenzo & the Laurentian Library

Piazza di San Lorenzo 9, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

In front of you is a great church with no face: a bare wall of rough brick, holes and all, where a marble front was supposed to go. San Lorenzo has one of the most famous unfinished façades in the world, and the reason it is bare is a Medici story.

A church stood here as early as the fourth century; it was consecrated in 393 by Saint Ambrose of Milan. In the early 1400s Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, Cosimo's father, paid Filippo Brunelleschi to rebuild it, and San Lorenzo became the Medici parish and family mausoleum. A century later a Medici pope, Leo X, commissioned Michelangelo to design a marble façade. The contract was signed in 1518 and cancelled in 1520. Michelangelo's wooden model survives in Casa Buonarroti; the bricks are still waiting.

Inside, Cosimo the Elder lies in the crypt beneath the high altar. On the floor in front of the altar a plaque gives him the title Pater Patriae, Father of his Country, voted by the city after his death in 1464. Donatello asked to be buried close to his great patron, and so he is.

Through the cloister on the left, a staircase leads up to the Laurentian Library, commissioned by another Medici pope, Clement VII, and designed by Michelangelo from 1524. The vestibule is a deliberately strange room: columns sunk into the walls, brackets that hold up nothing, and a staircase that seems to pour down like lava. Bartolomeo Ammannati built it in 1559 following Michelangelo's instructions, and the library opened in 1571. Among its treasures are the Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible, and a Virgil copied in late antiquity.

One family, a whole century of patronage: a banker's father pays for the church, his son is buried under it, two popes from the family fill it with Michelangelo. Now walk along the left side of the church to the back, where a huge dome rises over a small square. That dome is the family's final word.
3. Medici Chapels: Michelangelo's New Sacristy

Piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini 6, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

You are behind San Lorenzo now, in Piazza di Madonna degli Aldobrandini, looking up at a dome that seems far too big for the church it sits on. It crowns the Chapel of the Princes, the mausoleum the grand dukes built for themselves, and the door below is the entrance to the Medici Chapels.

The Chapel of the Princes was begun in 1604, an octagon whose walls are covered not with paint but with hard stones and precious marbles cut and fitted like a jigsaw, with the coats of arms of the Tuscan cities inlaid around the base. The workshop created to supply this kind of stonework, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, still exists. The decoration took centuries.

Then step into silence. Michelangelo's New Sacristy was begun around 1520 for the Medici pope Leo X and his cousin, Cardinal Giulio. On two tombs recline the figures of Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk, below idealised statues of two young dukes of the family. Lorenzo the Magnificent himself and his brother Giuliano, murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy, lie in a far plainer tomb under Michelangelo's Madonna. Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 and never came back; the work stayed unfinished.

In 1975 a small room was found below the sacristy, its walls covered with charcoal drawings that many scholars attribute to Michelangelo. One theory: in 1530, when the Medici returned after the siege, Michelangelo, who had designed the Republic's defences, hid down there for weeks, drawing on the walls. It has only recently been opened to small groups of visitors.

The dynasty ended here too. Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the last of the line, died in 1743 and was buried in these chapels. In 1737 she signed the Family Pact with the new rulers of Tuscany, and its clause that the Medici collections must never leave Florence is the reason the Uffizi is still full. Now walk west along Via del Melarancio to the wide square of Santa Maria Novella.
4. Piazza Santa Maria Novella: Cosimo's Chariot Race

Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Walk to the southern side of this long square and look back towards the church: two slender marble obelisks rise from the paving, each resting on four small bronze tortoises. They look like ornaments. They are actually turning posts.

In 1563 Duke Cosimo I created the Palio dei Cocchi, a chariot race in the Roman style, run in this square on the eve of the feast of Saint John the Baptist, the city's patron. Horse-drawn chariots thundered round the two posts while the crowd packed the edges. A Medici duke playing at ancient Rome... it was propaganda and entertainment in one. The first posts were wooden; the marble obelisks came in the early 1600s, and the tortoises are attributed to Giambologna. Slowest animal, fastest race. And the joke had a point: Cosimo's personal motto was festina lente, make haste slowly, and his emblem was a tortoise carrying a sail.

The square itself was opened by the Dominicans in the thirteenth century, enlarged so that crowds could gather to hear their preachers. On the southern side runs the Loggia di San Paolo, the portico of an old hospital, decorated with glazed terracotta medallions by Andrea della Robbia, including a scene of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic meeting and embracing.

And this square has a famous literary moment. Boccaccio opens the Decameron inside the church in front of you, during the Black Death of 1348. Seven young women meet there after Mass, decide to escape the dying city with three young men, and spend ten days in the hills telling each other one hundred stories. One of the great books of European literature begins on this spot.

For centuries this was a gateway: travellers arriving from the west, and later from the railway station just behind the church, came into Florence across this square, and grand hotels grew up around it. Now walk to the northern side and stand before the marble façade.
5. Basilica di Santa Maria Novella: Masaccio's Trinity

Piazza di Santa Maria Novella 18, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Face the green and white marble façade and run your eye along the band just below the top. You will find a carved sail, swollen with wind, repeated again and again. That is not a religious symbol. It is a family logo.

The Dominican friars began this Gothic church in the late thirteenth century, and the lower part of the façade is medieval. The upper part was designed by Leon Battista Alberti and completed in 1470 for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, whose name runs across the top in Latin capitals, with the date. The sail was his emblem, the wind of Fortune. Look also for the two astronomical instruments on the front, a quadrant and armillary spheres, added in the 1570s for Cosimo I by the Dominican astronomer Egnazio Danti.

Inside waits one of the turning points of Western art: Masaccio's Trinity, painted around 1427. With mathematically precise perspective, he opened a painted chapel in a flat wall, so convincing that it looks as if you could walk into it. Below lies a skeleton with a warning: I was once what you are, and what I am you will also be. In 1570 the fresco was hidden behind a new altar, and it was only rediscovered in the nineteenth century.

Behind the high altar, the Tornabuoni Chapel was frescoed in the late 1480s by Domenico Ghirlandaio for Giovanni Tornabuoni, manager of the Medici bank in Rome and uncle of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The sacred scenes are set in Florentine palaces, and the women of the Tornabuoni family attend the births of the Virgin and of Saint John in their finest silks. A teenage Michelangelo was apprenticed in Ghirlandaio's workshop around then.

So here is the quarter in one building: friars, a merchant's sail, a banker's chapel, a duke's instruments. Now turn left along Via della Scala, where the friars' old pharmacy still opens onto the street.
6. Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella

Via della Scala 16, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Step through the doorway on Via della Scala and let your eyes adjust: frescoed vaults, dark wooden cabinets, rows of glass jars and bottles, and a smell of iris, roses and citrus that seems to have soaked into the walls over four hundred years.

The Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella grew medicinal herbs in their gardens from their early days, and made ointments, waters and remedies for the sick in their own infirmary. In 1612 the pharmacy opened its doors to the public, with the approval of the grand duke, and it has been trading ever since, which makes it one of the oldest working pharmacies in the world.

The best-known legend belongs to Catherine de' Medici. The story goes that the friars created a citrus scent for her, which she took to France when she married the future King Henry II in 1533, and which became known as the Acqua della Regina, the Queen's Water. Some even claim she brought the fashion for perfume to the French court. Legends, perhaps... but they are very Medici legends.

Some of the old recipes have wonderful names. There is the Vinegar of the Seven Thieves, linked to a tale of robbers who protected themselves from the plague while stripping its victims, and there is Alkermes, a crimson liqueur that Tuscan cooks still pour into desserts. The rooms themselves are part of the old convent, including a former chapel, and you can still see where the friars' world met the street.

Think about what this place meant in a city of plague and fevers: a convent turned into a laboratory, with friars as chemists and a duke as its protector. The street outside takes its name from another charity, the medieval hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. Now continue west along Via della Scala, past the high walls of gardens, to the most famous private garden in Renaissance Florence.
7. Orti Oricellari: The Garden Where Machiavelli Talked Republics

Via della Scala 115, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Along this stretch of Via della Scala, behind high walls and gates, lie the Orti Oricellari, the Rucellai gardens. Oricellari is simply the Latin form of the family name. The garden belongs to a private palace today, so most of this story happens behind those walls... which is exactly how its first visitors liked it.

The garden was laid out in the late 1400s by Bernardo Rucellai, a man who had married into the Medici: his wife Nannina was Lorenzo the Magnificent's sister. After Lorenzo's death in 1492, scholars and poets who had gathered around the Medici began meeting here instead, under the trees, to talk about Plato, ancient Rome and how a city ought to be governed.

A generation later, in the 1510s, Bernardo's grandson Cosimo Rucellai hosted a circle of young Florentines here, and one of their regular guests was Niccolò Machiavelli, out of office and out of favour. He dedicated his Discourses on Livy to two of these friends, and his dialogue The Art of War, published in 1521, is set in this very garden, in the shade.

But talk about ancient republics can turn into something else. In 1522 some members of the circle were caught plotting against Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, who then governed Florence. One was executed, others fled into exile, and the gatherings in the garden came to an end. The Medici had a way of noticing who was talking about liberty, and where.

Later owners reshaped the gardens, and in the seventeenth century a giant stucco statue of Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, was set up among the trees, several times taller than a person. A Cyclops guarding the garden of free speech... Florence does love a symbol. Now head south through the quiet streets towards the river, to a church that opens onto a square beside the Arno.
8. Ognissanti: Botticelli and the Vespucci

Borgo Ognissanti 42, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Piazza d'Ognissanti opens onto the river, and on its north side stands the church of Ognissanti, All Saints, with a Baroque façade and a glazed terracotta lunette over the door. It looks calm and a little provincial. Inside, it is crowded with famous neighbours.

The church was founded in the 1250s by the Umiliati, a religious order that worked wool and ran a cloth business by the river, so this was an industrial quarter as much as a pious one. The façade you see was added in the 1600s. In the fifteenth century this was the parish of the Vespucci, a family of merchants close to the Medici, and of a painter called Sandro Botticelli.

In a chapel on the right, Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Madonna of Mercy for the Vespucci, around 1472, sheltering the family under her outstretched cloak. Tradition says one of the young faces is Amerigo Vespucci. Amerigo later worked for a branch of the Medici in Seville, sailed to the New World, and in 1507 a German mapmaker named the new continent America after him. So a whole continent is named after a boy from this parish.

Botticelli was buried here in 1510, under a simple round tombstone. In the same church lies Simonetta Vespucci, the celebrated beauty who died young in 1476. Legend says she was the model for his Venus, and that he asked to be buried at her feet... no document proves it, but Florentines have never stopped telling it. On the walls of the nave, Botticelli's Saint Augustine and Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome, both painted in 1480, still face each other like rivals in a contest.

Giotto's great Ognissanti Madonna once hung here too, before it moved to the Uffizi. Now walk east along Borgo Ognissanti and on into Via della Vigna Nuova, to a palace whose façade looks like a lesson in geometry.
9. Palazzo Rucellai & the Rucellai Loggia

Via della Vigna Nuova 18, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

On Via della Vigna Nuova, stop in front of a façade unlike the rough stone fortresses you have seen: smooth, flat, divided into a neat grid by pilasters, three storeys, three orders. Now look at its right-hand edge. The stones there end ragged, as if someone had cut the building off with a knife.

The palace was built around 1450 for Giovanni Rucellai, one of the richest men in Florence, to a design by Leon Battista Alberti, the same mind behind the façade of Santa Maria Novella. It was the first palace in Florence to wear the classical orders the way the Colosseum does, one above the other. Alberti was a theorist as much as a builder, the author of famous treatises on painting and architecture, and the actual construction is generally credited to Bernardo Rossellino. And that ragged edge? The façade was never completed, most likely because the next house could not be bought.

Giovanni had a problem. He was married to a daughter of Palla Strozzi, the great rival of the Medici, exiled in 1434 when Cosimo returned to power. In Medici Florence, that was a dangerous father-in-law to have, and for years Giovanni was kept away from office.

The solution was a wedding. In 1466 his son Bernardo married Nannina de' Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent's sister, and the celebrations spilled into the triangle of open space opposite, where the family built its loggia for exactly such occasions. Look up at the frieze: the Medici ring with feathers and the Rucellai sail sit side by side, a marriage contract in carved stone.

In his private notebook Giovanni reflected that he had found more satisfaction in spending money well than in earning it... and around the corner he paid Alberti for a small marble copy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in the family chapel of San Pancrazio. Now take the narrow streets north-east to Via de' Tornabuoni, the street named after Lorenzo's mother's family.
10. Via de' Tornabuoni: The Medici In-Laws

Via de' Tornabuoni, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

You are on Via de' Tornabuoni, the most elegant street in Florence: wide paving, stone palaces, and the shop windows of fashion houses where merchants' storerooms used to be. Its name belongs to a family, and that family belongs to the Medici story.

The Tornabuoni were an old Florentine house with palaces along this street. In 1444 Lucrezia Tornabuoni married Piero de' Medici, Cosimo's son, and became the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. She was far more than a bride: she wrote religious poems, managed property, and acted as a political adviser to her husband and later her son, one of the most influential women of fifteenth-century Florence. When it was time to find a wife for Lorenzo, she travelled to Rome to inspect the candidate, Clarice Orsini, and wrote home describing the girl in frank detail.

Her brother Giovanni Tornabuoni ran the Medici bank in Rome and paid for the chapel by Ghirlandaio you saw in Santa Maria Novella. In 1486 his son Lorenzo Tornabuoni married Giovanna degli Albizzi, and the wedding was celebrated in style: Botticelli painted frescoes for the family's villa outside the city, and Ghirlandaio painted Giovanna's portrait, a serene profile that now hangs in Madrid.

Then came the fall. Giovanna died in childbirth only two years after the wedding. And in 1497, with the Medici in exile and Savonarola's influence at its height, Lorenzo Tornabuoni was beheaded for plotting to bring his cousin Piero de' Medici back to power. Being a Medici in-law was a career, until it became a death sentence.

The street went on living. Grand Tour travellers strolled here, and Procacci, a little shop opened in 1885, still serves its famous truffle sandwiches to Florentines in their best coats. Now walk south, and on your left you cannot miss it: the biggest private palace in Florence, built by the Medici's oldest enemies.
11. Palazzo Strozzi: The Rival's Palace

Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Now the giant. Palazzo Strozzi is a freestanding cube of cushion-like rusticated stone, bigger than the Medici palace you started from, with wrought-iron lanterns and rings bolted to its corners. It was meant to impress, and it was meant to be noticed.

The Strozzi were among the richest families in Florence, and the Medici's rivals. When Cosimo returned to power in 1434, Palla Strozzi was exiled for good, and other members of the family followed him out of the city. One exile, Filippo Strozzi, made a fortune as a banker in Naples, was allowed back in 1466, and spent years quietly buying up the houses on this site.

The story goes that Filippo pretended to want something modest, even with shops on the ground floor, and let Lorenzo de' Medici talk him into building something grander. Whether or not that is true, building began in 1489, to a design by Benedetto da Maiano, with the great cornice by Simone del Pollaiolo, called Cronaca. Filippo died in 1491 and never saw it finished. The ironwork is by a smith nicknamed Caparra, the deposit, because, according to Vasari, he demanded payment in advance from everyone, however powerful.

The rivalry ended in blood. Filippo's son, also called Filippo, married a Medici, then turned against the Medici dukes. In 1537 he was captured leading exiles against Cosimo I at the battle of Montemurlo, and in 1538 he was found dead in his prison cell, possibly by his own hand. Legend says he left a line from Virgil calling for an avenger to rise from his bones.

Today the palace belongs to everyone: it hosts major art exhibitions, and its courtyard is open to passers-by. Walk through it if you can, then continue south down Via de' Tornabuoni to the square with a tall column in its centre.
12. Santa Trinita: The Medici Banker's Chapel

Piazza di Santa Trinita, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

In the middle of Piazza Santa Trinita a tall granite column holds up a figure of Justice in red porphyry, with scales in her hand. Behind it rises the late sixteenth-century façade of Santa Trinita. The column is your first clue, the chapel inside is your last.

The column came from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a gift from Pope Pius IV to Cosimo I, and it was raised here in 1565. Tradition says it marks the place where Cosimo heard the news of his victory at Montemurlo in 1537, the battle that destroyed the Strozzi and the last hopes of the old Republic. Justice, in other words, as the winner saw it.

Inside, in a chapel to the right of the high altar, Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the life of Saint Francis between 1483 and 1485 for Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici bank. The story goes that Sassetti had first wanted a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and that the Dominicans refused to have Saint Francis there. Look at the scene of the Pope approving the Franciscan rule: it is set not in Rome but in Piazza della Signoria, with the Palazzo Vecchio behind. On the right stands Lorenzo the Magnificent beside Sassetti, while the poet Poliziano climbs a staircase with Lorenzo's sons.

In another scene, a child brought back to life, Ghirlandaio painted this very square as it looked in his day, with the old front of the church and the medieval bridge. Sassetti and his wife kneel on either side of the altarpiece, a Nativity of 1485 that is still in place. He died in 1490, and four years later the Medici bank collapsed and the family was driven out of Florence.

You began at the palace where Cosimo quietly ran the city through friends and money, and you end in front of his bank manager, painted into a saint's life next to Lorenzo. The Medici fell, came back, became dukes and finally died out, and this quarter still carries all of it, in stone, paint and family names. Step outside: the river and the Ponte Santa Trinita are just ahead, and the walk is complete.