Florence Secret Palace Courtyards: Where to Look and How to Enter
Discover Florence secret palace courtyards hidden behind stone facades. Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Palazzo Strozzi, and lesser-known gems with practical.
What the facades conceal
The great palaces of Florence present a deliberately closed face to the street. Thick stone walls, narrow windows set high off the ground, and solid timber doors give nothing away about what lies behind. This was an intentional choice by the families who built them. In a city where wealth attracted both admiration and violence, architectural discretion was a form of protection.
What the facades conceal is often remarkable. Behind those heavy doors lie courtyards: some small and plain, some monumental in proportion, some furnished with ancient sculpture, well-heads, garden plantings, or elaborate fountain basins. Some have been unchanged in essential structure since the 15th century. Many can be entered by anyone who simply walks through a door that happens to be open.
This is one of the more genuine pleasures of moving through Florence on foot: the discovery that a door you nearly walked past opens into a world completely unlike the street outside. These spaces are not featured in most guidebooks. They do not appear on standard itineraries. And a significant number of them are free.
The logic of access
Understanding which courtyards you can enter, and when, requires understanding how these buildings function today. Many of the great Renaissance palaces on streets like Via dei Servi, Via dei Tornabuoni, Via Maggio, and Via dei Bardi have ground floors occupied by offices: notaries, law practices, cultural organisations, government departments, and private foundations.
Where there is an active ground floor, the entrance door is typically open during standard Italian business hours. That generally means 09:00 to 13:00 in the morning and 15:00 to 19:00 in the afternoon on weekdays. Saturday mornings work for some buildings. Sunday and evening visits are usually impossible unless the building functions explicitly as a museum.
Walking through an open door into a courtyard is not treated as trespassing under Italian cultural norms, provided you behave consistently with the character of the space. That means walking quietly, not opening internal doors without invitation, not photographing individuals without their consent, and leaving promptly if anyone indicates that the space is not accessible at that moment. Most of the time, no one will say anything at all.
The most productive time to explore courtyards is mid-morning on weekdays, specifically between 09:30 and 12:00, when offices are operating and doors are ajar. This is also the period when natural light from above makes the spaces most visually rewarding.
Five courtyards worth knowing
Palazzo Strozzi, on Piazza degli Strozzi, has the largest Renaissance palace courtyard in the city. Filippo Strozzi the Elder began construction in 1489, intending to build a palace that would surpass anything the Medici had commissioned. The building now operates as Florence’s main venue for international temporary exhibitions, managed by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. The ground floor and the courtyard can be entered freely even without a ticket to the current exhibition. Three floors of open loggias surround the central space in proportions that represent a refined development of the courtyard type established by Michelozzo at Palazzo Medici Riccardi a generation earlier.
Palazzo della Gherardesca on Borgo Pinti is now a hotel and not freely accessible to non-guests, but the gate from the street allows a partial view of one of the finest enclosed gardens in the city centre. Mature trees, a Baroque fountain, and a formal garden layout visible through the ironwork make it worth pausing even if you cannot enter.
Palazzo di Bianca Cappello at Via Maggio 26 is identifiable by its 16th-century facade, covered in graffito decoration in geometric patterns. The interior courtyard is accessible when the building’s ground floor is open. The building has housed offices for most of its modern history, and the condition of access varies. Pass by in the morning and try the door.
The courtyard of the Bargello at Via del Proconsolo 4 is fully accessible with museum entry at 10 euros. The Bargello was Florence’s first public building, completed in 1255, and served both as seat of government and as the city’s main prison. The courtyard walls bear painted coats of arms of former city administrators, accumulated across several centuries. The first-floor loggia, which opens directly onto the courtyard, houses important bronzes by Donatello.
The Chiostro dei Morti at the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, off Piazza Santissima Annunziata, is often overlooked entirely. Enter through the church’s loggia, turn left, and find the small cloister that served as the burial ground for Florentines of distinction from the 15th century onward. Entry is free. The lunettes of the cloister contain Mannerist frescoes attributed to Andrea del Sarto, in varying states of preservation but notable for their quality.
Palazzo Medici Riccardi: the benchmark courtyard
The courtyard of Palazzo Medici Riccardi at Via Cavour 3 is the most architecturally consequential in Florence and arguably in Italy. Michelozzo di Bartolomeo designed it for Cosimo de’ Medici starting in 1444. It established the formal template that virtually every subsequent Renaissance palace courtyard followed: a square or near-square space enclosed by arcaded loggias at ground level, with the upper floors rising above the arcade cornice.
The proportions work through carefully studied relationships. The diameter of the arches, the height of the columns, the entablature height, and the spacing of the upper-floor windows are all in ratios that produce a sense of ordered calm without mechanical rigidity. The capitals of the columns are classically derived but not copied from antiquity. They are new compositions working within a classical vocabulary, which is characteristic of the early Renaissance approach to the ancient world.
In the spandrels of the arches, circular tondi bear low-relief figures in the manner of ancient Roman cameos. These are attributed to Bertoldo di Giovanni and signal the humanist program of the building: a house designed to demonstrate its owner’s identification with the civilisation of ancient Rome. The decoration is not ornamental in the conventional sense. It is argumentative.
Admission to the palace costs 7 euros. The courtyard can sometimes be partially seen from the entrance foyer without a ticket, but the Cappella dei Magi, which houses Benozzo Gozzoli’s extraordinary fresco cycle of the Procession of the Magi, requires the full ticket and is the main reason to pay. The palace is open Monday to Wednesday and Friday to Sunday from 09:00 to 19:00.
Organised access: FAI open days and cultural institutions
Beyond the individually accessible courtyards, two routes exist for visiting spaces that are not normally open.
The FAI (Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano) organises open-house weekends twice a year: typically in March and again in October. On these weekends, private palaces and normally inaccessible courtyards across Italy open to the public, often with volunteer guides available. Florence participates actively, and the list of accessible buildings is published on fondoambiente.it several weeks before each event. For anyone interested in interior spaces that are otherwise permanently closed, this is the most reliable route.
Several cultural institutions based in historic palace buildings maintain public or semi-public access. The British Institute of Florence at Piazza Strozzi 2 occupies a 15th-century building and has a library and reading room accessible to registered users. The Fondazione Zeffirelli at Piazza San Firenze 5 is in a 17th-century palace with an accessible courtyard during the foundation’s opening hours.
Hotels in historic palaces present a different case. Where a hotel has converted a palace, access to private areas is restricted to guests, but lobby spaces and occasionally small courtyard sections adjacent to public entrances may be visible on entry. This varies considerably by property and is not something that can be planned in advance.
Where to Stay in Florence
The Key is at Via Cittadella 22, five minutes on foot from Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. Palazzo Strozzi is about 12 minutes on foot heading east along Via dei Cerretani and then south on Via dei Tornabuoni. Palazzo Medici Riccardi is roughly 15 minutes on foot through the centre, passing the Duomo. Full details at The Key.
