Tours / Private guided tour of the Accademy Gallery and of the Duomo Square

Get ready to gaze in wonder at David and at the stunning Duomo Square during our guided private tour with priority access to the Accademia Gallery!

Michelangelo’s David and the Duomo are two symbols of Florence so no trip to this city would be complete without a guided tour with express entrance to the Accademia and a visit of the Duomo Square.

The Accademy Gallery is the second most visited museum of Florence

so here the lines for the entrance can be very long, but with our tour with express access, we will be in the museum facing David, before you realize! Michelangelo the divine, as contemporaries called him, was not an easy going person at all. Our tour will give you a deep insight of his complex and fascinating personality, his manias and pursuit of solitude as well as his fascinating artistry in the way he sculpted the stone as if he was releasing something imprisoned by the marble. You will be seduced by the beauty of David, smooth like liquid stone, and its perfect anatomy. In fact, you won’t see only David at the Accademia Gallery.

This museum also houses the famous ‘Prisoners’, a group of statues that Michelangelo started, but never completed. They look amazingly modern to our eyes despite the fact that they were started five hundred years ago and never finished. During our guided tour you will find out why he never completed them and all the troubles that they caused to him!

Our guided tour of the Accademy Gallery will continue to the stunning Duomo Square, the heart of the city and an absolute must see location during your visit to Florence.

Our walking tour will proceed to the Duomo Square where we will admire  Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral (or the Duomo as we call it) with its imposing red tiled Dome, as well as Saint John Baptistery and the Belltower reaching towards the sky. It took more than a hundred years to build the Cathedral which project was inspired by the will of showing the power and the wealth of Florence. Nowadays, visitors are still hypnotized by the magnificence of the Duomo, its colored marbled surface and its gigantic dome that can be seen from just about everywhere in the city!

Our tour will reveal to you the secrets behind the construction of the Duomo. Did you know that the dome was built without using a single supporting scaffolding? No one knew how to build this massive dome on top of the church until Filippo Brunelleschi, a Renaissance genius, designed a revolutionary building technique which was later used to build the dome of Saint Peter Basilica in Rome, Saint Paul’s in London and the Capitol Building in Washington. With our tour you will discover how he did that!

Join me to see the Baptistery of Florence with its shiny mosaics and the Opera del Duomo Museum where the iconic Ghiberti’s door is.

Facing the Duomo is the beautiful Baptistery, one of the oldest buildings in Florence. People have been baptized here for hundreds of years! In our tour, we won’t miss entering the Baptistery where you will be left speechless by the gleaming mosaics covering the entire surface of the ceiling and depicting the Last Judgment, a real feast for your eyes! Last, but not least in terms of importance,the Opera del Duomo Museum, right behind the Duomo, is an incredible museum that you absolutely have to visit with your local guide. It houses the famous Gates of Paradise, a huge gilded bronze door portraying stories from the Old Testament and which was once the eastern door of the Baptistery. This incredible masterpiece made by Lorenzo Ghiberti is considered an icon of Renaissance art and shouldn’t be missed during your visit to Florence.

Our tour will also include another masterpiece in this museum, Michelangelo’s Pietà. He made it when he was an old and disillusioned man and despite its touching beauty, it didn’t satisfy Michelangelo’s taste, but I’m pretty sure it will satisfy yours!

Our private tour of the Accademia Gallery and of the Duomo Square will cover two unmissable places of Florence.

Visiting them with your private guide will give you express entrance at the Accademia and a full understanding of Michelangelo’s life and art. The Duomo Square with its gorgeous monuments won’t have any secrets left for you.  Additionally, after our tour, you will have the opportunity to climb the 465 steps of the dome or the 414 of the Belltower!