The most popular months to visit Florence are also tend to be hot and unfortunately visitors experience that heat not just while staggering around the sights of Florence, but also when they're trying to sleep. There is a solution. Find your vacation accommodations in Fiesole!
View of Fiesole above Florence
A bit of history. The Etruscans lived where Fiesole is now - they called it Vipsul - in large part because they were hedonists who enjoyed the good life, especially cool breezes during mid-summer. The Romans were made of sterner stuff. They built their colony down below in the stifling Arno valley where they could tax north-south traffic that crossed the river over the bridge they built there. This was Florentia, founded around 59 BC, most likely under Julius Caesar, to settle veterans in the Arno valley. Needless to say, the better classes of Roman society migrated to their country houses up in Fiesole during summer. They even built themselves a nice theatre up there.
Roman theatre in Fiesole.
You should consider a stay in Fiesole when you visit Florence. Forget the humid heat at midnight, forget the tour group on the doorstep at 7am, forget the queue at your favorite restaurant, forget a street full of drunk twenty-year-olds below the window until 2am. Instead, after a cool, quiet night of sleep, you walk out of your hotel or B&B and onto a quiet piazza where old men are playing cards outside the bar. A three-star hotel in Fiesole with a view over Florence costs what a two-star in the centro storico of Florence costs without the view. An agriturismo on the slopes between Fiesole and the city often costs less than a standard hotel room in the historic centre of Florence. From the terrace behind the Fiesole cathedral, Florence unfolds below - the Duomo, the Campanile, the Arno, the hills on the far side.
View of Florence from Fiesole
What about getting from Fiesole to Florence and back?
Don't take your car, if you have one. You don't need to grapple with traffic, one way streets and ZTLs. Take the line 7 bus from Piazza Mino in Fiesole to Ponte Rosso and then take the T2 tram to Piazza San Marco in central Florence. Buy a single ATAF ticket from the ticket-dispensing machine (cash or touch your credit card to the machine) or from any tabaccheria before you board, or a day pass if you plan to come and go twice. Don't forget to validate your ticket as you enter the bus. Sit on the left side going down for the view. You can even walk down, starting on Via Vecchia Fiesolana, all the way to Florence in about 90 minutes. The fastest way to get from Fiesole to Florence is to taxi which takes 13 min and costs €12 - €15.
Note that I don't recommend that you try to return to Fiesole on foot! The line 7 bus from Ponte Rosso to Fiesole Piazza Mino takes 18 min and departs every 20 minutes.
HOWEVER I can and do highly recommend the Tuscany Quintessence eBike guided tour from Florence to Fiesole and back.
More about the Tuscany Quintessence eBike tour of Fiesole from Florence.
What to see and do in Fiesole.
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Author: Anna Maria Baldini
