Florence Packing List Tips by brendareed Top 5 Page for this destination

Wear good walking shoes! Comfortable Shoes Review

Clothing/Shoes/Weather Gear: Good, sturdy walking shoes are a must for this city! The cobblestone streets are uneven and can make for some difficult walking for even the best of walkers. Florence is very much a walking city so you want to be comfortable. Also, if you are touring the museums, you will be on your feet quite a bit. So good sturdy shoes that you have broken in before your trip are a definite must pack item. I personally have a great pair of walking shoes that are also waterproof, so if it rains my feet don’t get wet either. Save those heels for other cities!

Now that you are packed and ready to go – let’s go to Florence! I flew from Germany to Florence, arriving at the Florence airport. I needed to get to my hotel in the city center. My favorite and easiest option is to take the SITA bus.

Books, maps, and audio tours

Miscellaneous: You are ready to head to Florence– you’ve confirmed the hotel, got the e-tickets for the flight, and made reservations for the dog at the kennel. But wait! Have you forgotten something? Other than the obvious logistical details of the trip, it is worth spending time reading up on this city and the amazing things you will see BEFORE you ever leave home. If you try to do it all while in Florence (besides fighting your jet lag) – you will miss a good bit. Spend a month or more reading about the history of the city, the types of architecture you will see, and the various artists and art within the city. You will appreciate what you are seeing so much more and maybe will be able to impress your family and friends with your new-found expertise!

While you can get a free map at your hotel, take some time to look over the maps online – you can easily create your own Google map with your trip highlights on it. I did this and it allowed me to realistically plan each day out so I wasn’t cramming too much in only to be disappointed. You can get directions from one place to another – while I didn’t use these directions once in Florence, the initial prep stage allowed me to see how far it would take to walk from one place to another. And I was surprised at how close most things were to each other!

Besides looking through the Virtual Tourist pages on Florence, invest in a good guide book or two. For general planning, we like the Eyewitness books with their colorful pictures. But for in-depth tours and details about the architecture and the art, the must-have guide is The Blue Guide – Florence, which cannot be beat for its information. It contains floorplans for most of the churches as well as tours of the museums. This book paid for itself so many times, especially in many places with little detailed signage.

Audio tours are in many of the top tourist attractions and you can easily spend €5 or more per guide. We found the Rick Steves’ audio tours (and tour maps) on iTunes for FREE. Most of these tours are 30-45 minutes long and give you very good details on where to walk, look, etc. You can start and stop as you wish and the entire family can download them to their own iPods so you don’t have to share earphones to save money (something I saw many people doing with the audio guides rented at the sites). The audio tours are informative and provide just enough historical background for the average non-historian to absorb while providing some fun-facts and humor along the way. Audio tours are available for a Renaissance walk of the city, the Uffizi Gallery, and the Accademia, along downloadable maps of the tour.

As a history major with an interest in art history, I had done a good bit of study before our trip. One book that I highly recommend is Ross King’s ''Brunelleschi's Dome'', which is the story of how Brunelleschi built the dome and the equipment needed to do it. It is an easy read but has enough technical details that you will come away educated and understanding that dome so much better than if you just stand under it and look up unaware of what you are really looking at (it also helped me appreciate the climb up to the top!).

So get your tickets and hotel reservations lined up, then take some time to research this wonderful city before you get here – you’ll be thankful that you took the time to do it and will enjoy it so much more.

And while you are packing, don’t forget to think about your feet – pack a pair of good walking shoes.