Florence Uncrowded

Private Uffizi openings, Medici villas and artisan ateliers — the city as it can still be visited, with the right planning.

There is a question that surfaces in nearly every Florence consultation we have: whether it is still possible to enjoy the city. The answer, we believe, is yes — but only if the visit is conceived as something different from what most visitors arrive intending it to be. The Florence of the day-visitor — the queue at the Uffizi, the sea of hats on the Ponte Vecchio at three in the afternoon, the bus crowds at Piazzale Michelangelo — is a Florence that has, in the last decade, become genuinely difficult to enjoy. The Florence of the morning visitor, the after-hours visitor, the home-of-a-friend visitor, is a Florence that is more or less the city our clients fall in love with.

The Uffizi, Privately

The Uffizi receives more than four million visitors a year. The carrying capacity of the building is roughly nine hundred at any given moment. The result, for most of the year, is a visit conducted at unfortunate density, with the most important rooms — the Botticellis, the Leonardo — viewable only over the shoulders of the parties in front. The visit we arrange is different. The Uffizi opens, by negotiated arrangement with the museum's directorate, for private after-hours visits to a single party of up to twelve. The party enters at six-fifteen, after the public has left; an art historian whom we work with regularly conducts the visit, which lasts approximately two hours; and the rooms are, for those two hours, empty.

The cost is not insignificant, but the experience is what the building was built for. To stand alone in the Tribuna at seven in the evening, with the light falling through the lantern onto the Medici Venus and a glass of Frescobaldi in one's hand, is the Uffizi as a private gentleman of the seventeenth century would have known it. Combined with a similar opening of the Galleria dell'Accademia for the David — also available, at the right notice — these are among the most quietly remarkable hours we arrange in any city in Italy.

The Medici Villas

There is, around Florence, a circle of country villas that the Medici built over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as their family agriculture and family pleasure-houses. Most of them remain, in some form. Some are public museums. Some are private. The most beautiful of them — the Villa di Castello, the Villa la Petraia, the Villa di Pratolino — are within twenty minutes of the centre by car and almost never appear on a first-time visitor's itinerary.

We arrange visits to them with art historians who specialise in Medici-period architecture and garden history. The visit to the Villa di Castello, with its garden grottoes by Tribolo and Vasari, is among the most considered hours one can spend on Renaissance garden-making. The visit to Pratolino, with its colossal Appennino sculpture by Giambologna, is something close to a private encounter with one of the most photographed pieces of late Mannerist art in Italy. These are the visits we propose for our second-time and third-time Florence clients.

The Artisan Ateliers

Florence's artisan culture is one of its quietest treasures, and one of the reasons we send a certain kind of client there preferentially. The city remains the world centre for a number of specialist crafts at the highest level: bespoke shoemaking at Stefano Bemer and at Mannina, leather of the calibre of Madova and the smaller workshops behind Piazza Santo Spirito, the gold work of the Ponte Vecchio's surviving ancestral jewellers, the silk-weaving of the Antico Setificio Fiorentino in the Oltrarno, the perfumery of Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella.

We arrange private appointments at these ateliers — the kind of visit at which the maker himself receives the client, explains the work, and, if the client wishes, takes orders. A pair of bespoke shoes from Stefano Bemer requires three months and three fittings; the first fitting is best done in person. A custom silk-weave from Antico Setificio takes six months. A bespoke fragrance from one of the smaller perfumers in the Oltrarno is a year-long collaboration. These are not visits in any conventional sense; they are the beginning of relationships.

Where to Stay, and How to Live

The Florence hotel scene has improved markedly in the last five years. The classics remain — the Four Seasons in the Palazzo della Gherardesca, the Hotel Savoy on Piazza della Repubblica, the Helvetia & Bristol — and the more recent additions are real: the Six Senses on the Pitti side of the river, the Collegio alla Querce in the hills above the centre, the Hotel Lungarno restored. For clients who want more than a hotel, we arrange floors of historic palazzi taken with full staff: a piano nobile near Santo Spirito, an apartment in a converted convent in San Niccolò, a country villa in Fiesole or Settignano twenty minutes from the centre by car.

The Florence of our recommendation is one in which the visitor does not race through the major sights but lives, instead, the city's slower rhythm. A coffee at the Caffè Gilli at nine. A morning at one museum, never two. A long lunch at Cibrèo or Trattoria Sostanza or Buca Lapi. An afternoon at the hotel. An aperitivo at Procacci on Via Tornabuoni. A dinner at home with a private chef, or at Cibrèo Trattoria, or at La Bottega del Buon Caffè. This is a Florence that, with the right planning, the city still gives quite freely.