Florence's Green Hill: Bardini Garden, San Miniato & Piazzale Michelangelo

Up from the Arno through wisteria, olive groves and medieval walls to the city's most beautiful church and its most famous view, then down to the tower that never fell

Florence · 12 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Ponte alle Grazie: The Bridge of the Walled-In Women

Ponte alle Grazie, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Stop halfway across and face upstream: the river widens, the hills on your right are dark with cypresses, and on the far bank a single tall stone tower stands alone among the plane trees. That green hill is where you are going. But first, look down at the bridge under your feet... because it is not what it used to be.

A bridge has stood here since the 1230s. It was first called the Ponte Rubaconte, after the city magistrate who built it, and it was long and solid, with many stone arches. Chroniclers report that it survived the great flood of 1333, which swept away the Ponte Vecchio downstream. Over time little chapels were built on its piers, and one of them held an image of the Madonna delle Grazie, Our Lady of Graces. The name stuck to the whole bridge.

And then there were the hermits. In the fourteenth century a few devout women had themselves walled into tiny cells on the bridge, living on alms passed through a window, praying over the water day and night. Florentines called them the Murate, the walled-in women. Eventually they moved to a proper convent in the city, which kept the name. Centuries later that convent became a prison, and today it is a cultural centre.

The houses and chapels were cleared in the nineteenth century to widen the road. Then, on the night of the 3rd to the 4th of August 1944, German troops blew up the bridge along with all the others except the Ponte Vecchio. The plain modern bridge you are standing on replaced it after the war, the result of an architectural competition. Florentines have argued ever since about whether it is honest or just dull.

Now look at the hills again. Everything on this walk is up there: a garden of wisteria, a fortress, olive groves inside the city walls and a church covered in green and white marble. Walk off the bridge onto the Oltrarno bank and into the little square straight ahead, Piazza de' Mozzi.
2. Museo Bardini: The Palace of the Prince of Antique Dealers

Via dei Renai 37, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Face the large palace on the side of Piazza de' Mozzi and study its windows: they do not match. Some are framed in Renaissance stone, some look borrowed from somewhere else entirely... and they are, because this whole building is a kind of collage.

It belonged to Stefano Bardini, a painter who became the most powerful antique dealer in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Museums in Berlin, London and Paris bought from him, and so did the American millionaires who wanted a little piece of the Renaissance in their mansions. In 1881 he bought a former church and convent on this square and rebuilt it as his showroom.

And what a showroom. Bardini set real Renaissance doorways, coffered ceilings, stone fireplaces and staircases from dismantled buildings into his own walls, so that clients could see a sculpture or a painting as it might look in a palace. Then he painted the rooms a deep, intense blue, so that marble, bronze and gold leaf would glow against it. Restorers still call that colour Bardini blue.

There is an uncomfortable side to the story. This was the time when Florence demolished its medieval market quarter to build Piazza della Repubblica, and dealers like Bardini bought the fragments. Without him much would have been lost; because of him, much left Italy. When he died in 1922, he left the building and its collection to the city of Florence, perhaps as a way of balancing the books.

Inside, among the Madonnas and the armour, waits a familiar animal. The bronze wild boar you may have seen rubbed for luck at the Mercato Nuovo is a copy; the original, cast by Pietro Tacca in the seventeenth century, now rests here, out of reach of a million hopeful hands. Now cross the little square to the garden gate on Via de' Bardi, and start to climb.
3. Giardino Bardini: The Wisteria Tunnel Above the Arno

Costa San Giorgio 2, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Climb the terraces until you reach the long pergola at the top and walk under it: a tunnel of twisted grey trunks and, in late April, a ceiling of hanging lilac flowers so thick that the light turns violet and the air smells of honey. Bees drone overhead. Below you, framed by leaves, lies the whole of Florence.

This hillside has been a garden for a very long time. In the Middle Ages it was the orchard of the Mozzi, a family of bankers who lived in the palace at the foot of the hill. In the seventeenth century a villa was built at the top, and in 1913 the whole estate was bought by Stefano Bardini, the antique dealer whose museum you just passed. He reshaped it as a setting for his business, of course, with statues and balustrades to impress his clients.

Look down the slope at the baroque staircase cutting straight through the middle of the garden, with its fountains and mosaics of pebbles, aimed directly at the Arno. On one side the garden is formal and Italian, on the other a shady English wood, and lower down there is an orchard with old varieties of fruit trees. In early summer, hydrangeas take over from the wisteria and the terraces turn blue.

It almost disappeared. After Bardini's son Ugo died in 1965, the property passed to the Italian state, and for decades it was tangled in lawsuits and slowly went wild. Only after a long restoration did the garden open to the public, in 2007.

Before you leave, find the belvedere and look across: the dome of the cathedral seems close enough to touch, and the bell towers line up like chess pieces. Many Florentines think this view is better than the famous one you will see later, because here you are inside the city, not above it. Leave by the upper gate onto Costa San Giorgio, the steep lane behind the villa, and walk uphill.
4. Costa San Giorgio: Galileo's Steep Street

Costa San Giorgio 19, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Lean into the slope and catch your breath: Costa San Giorgio is one of the steepest streets in Florence, a ribbon of cobbles squeezed between garden walls, with wisteria and ivy spilling over the top. Look along the lane for a house with a plaque. It belonged to the most famous scientist of his age.

In 1610 Galileo Galilei was a professor in Padua, and he had just pointed a home-made telescope at the night sky. He saw mountains on the Moon, countless stars in the Milky Way, and four little moons circling Jupiter. With brilliant timing he named those moons the Medicean Stars, after the young Grand Duke Cosimo the Second, his former pupil. The flattery worked. That same year he was called home to Florence as the Grand Duke's chief mathematician and philosopher.

He rented a house here, on this steep street on the edge of the city. Imagine him climbing up from the river in the evening, a telescope under his arm, heading for the darker sky of the hills to observe the phases of Venus and the spots on the Sun. Those spots were a problem. A perfect heaven was not supposed to have blemishes.

The trouble that followed is well known. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition condemned him for defending the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun, and he spent his last years under house arrest in a villa at Arcetri, in the hills to the south of here. He died there in 1642, almost blind.

And a strange relic of him survives in Florence. When his body was moved to a grand tomb in the following century, admirers removed several fingers, and one of them, a middle finger, is still displayed in the science museum by the Arno, pointing at the sky. Keep climbing to the top of Costa San Giorgio, where the street runs straight into an old city gate.
5. Porta San Giorgio and the Forte di Belvedere

Costa San Giorgio, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand under the arch of the gate and look up at the stone panel on the outer face: a knight on horseback driving his lance into a twisting dragon. Saint George, patron of this gate, of this hill and of the steep street you have just climbed.

Porta San Giorgio was built in 1324, and it is the oldest gate still standing in the walls of Florence. The relief you see is a copy; the original was moved indoors to protect it. Inside the arch, look for the faded fresco of the Madonna between two saints, painted in the fifteenth century by Bicci di Lorenzo for travellers and guards who wanted a blessing on the way in or out.

Now turn to the great sloping walls beside the gate. That is the Forte di Belvedere, built between 1590 and 1595 by Bernardo Buontalenti for Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici. Officially it defended Florence from foreign armies. But notice which way the guns could point... down, over the rooftops, at the Florentines themselves, who had thrown the Medici out more than once. The Grand Dukes could retreat here directly from the Pitti Palace through their own gardens.

Legend says the Medici kept their treasure hidden in a secret chamber inside the fort, and that only the Grand Duke and a few trusted men knew how to open it. Today the fort is used for summer exhibitions, and its ramparts offer one of the widest views in the city.

Now look the other way, outside the gate, down Via di San Leonardo. Within a few steps the city simply stops: stone walls, cypresses, and grey-green olive groves, still harvested every autumn. In 1878 Tchaikovsky spent several weeks in a villa along this lane, and wrote happily about the quiet. Our route turns left instead, along Via di Belvedere, which follows the outside of the medieval walls downhill.
6. Via di Belvedere: Olive Groves Under the Walls

Via di Belvedere, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Walk slowly down the lane with the city wall on your left: tall, crenellated, built of rough brown stone, with a square tower every so often. On your right, behind a low wall, the slope falls away in terraces of olive trees, their leaves flipping silver whenever the wind moves them. You are in the middle of Florence... and it sounds like the countryside.

This is the longest surviving stretch of the last ring of walls of Florence, built in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In their day they ran for more than eight kilometres around the city, with dozens of towers and gates. In the 1860s, when Florence briefly became the capital of Italy, most of them were demolished to make room for wide boulevards. Here, on the steep hillside, nobody needed a boulevard, so the wall survived.

Look over the wall at those olive trees. Some of them are older than they look; olive trees regrow from the roots, and after the terrible frost of 1985, which killed countless trees across Tuscany, many groves here were cut back to the stump and sprouted again. Every November the nets come out, and the olives are still picked here, inside the city limits, and pressed into fresh green oil.

Stop for a moment and listen. Swifts screaming around the towers in summer, a dog barking at a farmhouse, the bells of San Miniato carrying across the valley. Lizards sun themselves in the cracks of the wall, and the stone is warm under your hand even in the evening.

These walls saw real war. In 1529 and 1530, the armies of the Emperor and the Pope camped on these hills to besiege the last Florentine Republic, and the defenders watched them from these towers for nearly a year. Keep following the wall down the hill to the small gate at the bottom, Porta San Miniato.
7. Porta San Miniato and the Road of the Crosses

Via del Monte alle Croci, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Stop beside the little gate and take a good look at it: just a simple arch cut through the thickness of the wall, no tower, no statue, no drama. Porta San Miniato was never meant for armies or merchants. It was a door for pilgrims, for the people of this quarter going up to their church on the hill.

Ahead of you, a steep lane climbs between walls and gardens. Its name is Via del Monte alle Croci, the street of the mountain of the crosses, because it was once lined with the Stations of the Cross, and the faithful climbed it on their knees, praying at each one. Some small stone stations still stand along the way.

In 1529 this slope became the front line. The Florentines had expelled the Medici and declared a republic, and the Medici pope, Clement the Seventh, made peace with the Emperor so that the imperial army could put the family back in power. The Republic appointed none other than Michelangelo as governor of its fortifications, and he raised earth bastions around San Miniato, on the hill above you, because whoever held that height could fire straight into the city.

On the way up, you will pass a calm church with a plain facade, San Salvatore al Monte. Vasari tells us that Michelangelo loved its simplicity so much that he called it la bella villanella, the pretty country girl. It is a lovely compliment from a man who rarely gave them.

The climb is short but steep, and the reward is worth every step. Follow the lane and then the long monumental staircase up to the top of the hill, to the green and white marble facade that you will see shining through the cypresses... the basilica of San Miniato al Monte.
8. San Miniato al Monte: The Martyr Who Walked Up the Hill

Via delle Porte Sante 34, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Turn around at the top of the staircase before you look at the church: the whole of Florence is spread out beneath you, red roofs, white bell towers, the dome floating above everything. Then turn back to the facade, a geometric pattern of green and white marble, crowned by a golden mosaic and, at the very top, a bronze eagle clutching a bale of cloth.

The legend behind this place is a strange one. Miniato was a Christian, perhaps a soldier or a prince from the East, executed in Florence around the year 250. The story goes that after his head was cut off, he picked it up, crossed the Arno, and walked up this hill to the place where he wished to be buried. A chapel marked the spot, and in 1018 Bishop Hildebrand began the church you see now.

The eagle on top is not a religious symbol. It is the badge of the Calimala, the guild of the cloth merchants, who paid for the upkeep of the church for centuries and wanted everyone to know it. Inside, the floor of the nave holds a marble zodiac dated 1207, and some scholars believe it was placed so that, on certain days, sunlight from the windows falls on particular signs.

Look up at the bell tower beside the church. During the siege of 1529 and 1530, the imperial gunners tried to destroy it, because the defenders had placed cannon on top. Michelangelo, the story goes, had the tower wrapped in mattresses and bales of wool, which absorbed the cannonballs. It still stands.

Behind the church lies the cemetery of the Porte Sante, a hillside city of marble angels and family chapels. Among those buried there is Carlo Lorenzini, better known as Collodi, the Florentine who gave the world Pinocchio. The Olivetan monks who live here still sing their prayers in Gregorian chant. Now walk back down the staircase and follow the road downhill to the great open terrace just below.
9. Piazzale Michelangelo: A Terrace Built for a Capital

Piazzale Michelangelo, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Walk to the balustrade and take it all in: the river with its bridges stacked one behind the other, the dome of the cathedral, the slim tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the long roof of Santa Croce, and behind them the hills rising towards Fiesole. This is the view on a thousand postcards, and it still works.

The terrace is younger than it feels. In 1865 Florence became the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy, and the city set out to look the part. The architect Giuseppe Poggi tore down most of the medieval walls north of the river, laid out wide avenues, and on this side designed a winding boulevard climbing the hills, the Viale dei Colli, ending in this terrace, completed in 1869.

In the middle stands a bronze David, a copy of Michelangelo's marble one, surrounded by copies of the four reclining figures from the Medici tombs. When the bronze was cast in the 1870s, it had to be dragged up the hill by teams of oxen. And the elegant building behind you was planned as a museum of Michelangelo's works. It never became one.

By 1871 the capital had moved on to Rome, and Florence was left with grand plans and enormous debts. For a while the city was close to bankruptcy. But Poggi's work stayed, and today it is hard to imagine the city without the terrace that shows it off so well.

Come back at sunset if you can. The stone of the city turns pink and then gold, the swallows come out, and someone always starts playing a guitar. Now walk to the left end of the terrace, where a path and a gate lead down into a hidden garden on the slope beneath your feet.
10. Giardino delle Rose: A Rose Garden Under the View

Viale Giuseppe Poggi 2, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Go through the gate and down the first steps: suddenly the coaches and the selfie sticks have gone, and you are on narrow terraces of roses, bright against the grey of the olive trees, with the domes and towers of Florence floating above the hedges. In May the smell alone is enough to stop you.

This slope was laid out in 1865 by the same Giuseppe Poggi who built the terrace above, as part of his grand plan for the hills. It opened to the public in 1895, and today it holds hundreds of varieties of roses, from old botanical species to modern hybrids. The best time to come is from late April to early June, when the beds are in full flower; in winter it is a quiet garden of bare canes and views.

Walk down to the lower terraces and you will meet some strange visitors. Quiet bronze figures stand among the beds, dreamers and travellers in long coats, gazing out at the city. These are sculptures by the Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon, given to the city after his death. Folon loved Florence, and his dreamers seem quite at home looking out over it.

In one corner there is also a small Japanese garden, with stones, water and a lantern, a sign of the friendship between Florence and its twin city of Kyoto. And look under the rose bushes... you will often see the garden's cats, who regard the whole place as their private property.

It is a reminder that on this hill, nature and design have always worked together: Poggi planned the slopes as carefully as the roads. Leave by the lower gate onto Via di San Salvatore al Monte and follow it downhill to the river, where a single tall tower stands alone in a square.
11. Porta San Niccolò: The Tower That Kept Its Height

Piazza Giuseppe Poggi, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand on the riverside square and tilt your head back: the tower of Porta San Niccolò rises straight up from the lawn, square, tall and completely alone, with no wall left on either side to hold it. Behind it, ramps and staircases zig-zag up the hill you have just come down.

This gate was built in 1324, part of the same ring of walls as Porta San Giorgio. Once every gate in Florence had a tower this tall. But in the sixteenth century, when cannon made high towers into easy targets, the Florentines cut them down to the height of the walls. This one, protected by the hill behind it, was spared, and it is the only gate in the city that still stands at its full original height.

Then came the nineteenth century, and Giuseppe Poggi's plans for the capital. The walls along here were demolished, and the tower could easily have gone with them. Poggi chose to keep it, standing free, as a monument to the medieval city, and he built the square around it.

The ramps behind the tower are his too, the Rampe del Poggi: flights of steps and gravel paths winding past grottoes, fountains and a cascade of water, linking the river to the terrace at the top. They were designed to make the climb a pleasure, a stroll through a garden rather than a march up a slope. After years of neglect they have been restored, and on summer evenings they fill with people walking up to watch the sunset.

In the summer months the tower itself is sometimes opened, and you can climb its narrow stairs for a view straight down the Arno. Now walk away from the river, into the narrow street of shops and houses that leads west, Via di San Niccolò, to the parish church of this quarter.
12. San Niccolò Oltrarno: Michelangelo's Hiding Place

Via di San Niccolò, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy

Stop in front of the modest church on Via di San Niccolò, its facade plain and unfinished, its door often closed, its bell tower rising above the rooftops behind. Of all the churches in Florence, this is one that most visitors walk past without a second look. It holds one of the best stories of the walk.

In August 1530 the siege ended. Florence surrendered, the Republic fell, and the Medici came back with a list of names. Near the top of it was Michelangelo, the man who had built the defences against them, even though he had grown up in the Medici household and worked for a Medici pope.

So he hid. According to Vasari, Michelangelo took refuge here, in the bell tower of San Niccolò, sheltered by the parish priest, while the Medici's men searched the city. In 1975 a small room with charcoal drawings on its walls was discovered under the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, and some scholars believe he hid there as well. Either way, the pope who had been besieging Florence soon decided he needed his sculptor more than his revenge, and Michelangelo was pardoned and sent back to work on the Medici tombs.

Inside the church, if you are lucky enough to find it open, look for the fresco in the sacristy of the Madonna handing her girdle to Saint Thomas, attributed to Piero del Pollaiolo. And on the walls of this street look for the small plaques that mark the height of floods: in November 1966 the Arno rose higher than the doorways here, and the church was filled with water and mud.

And that is the end of the climb and the descent. You started on a bridge of walled-in hermits, walked through wisteria and olive groves, followed Galileo uphill and the martyr Miniato to his hill, and came back down to the hiding place of Michelangelo himself. The river is just behind you, and the bars of Via di San Niccolò are waiting... you have earned a glass.