Florence Dark Mysteries and Legends Self-Guided Walking Tour

Highlights

• App-based self-guided tour
• Fully offline map
• Spooky legends and secrets

What's included

Itinerary

1. 1

   Stop 1

   5min

   A friar seized Florence from this quiet square. His bonfire consumed the city's art, its books, its mirrors. Florence applauded, then burned him in the same spot. The tour begins here.

2. 2

   Piazza Della Santissima Annunziata

   10min

   Brunelleschi's perfect piazza hides two windows with opposite fates. One sealed forever after a conspiracy. One open for five centuries, kept that way by a ghost who made a promise and never broke it.

3. 3

   Stop 3

   10min

   The oldest hospital in Florence was founded by Dante's Beatrice's father. Beneath it, tunnels moved bodies in secret. Above it, the ghost of its first nurse still walks the wards and refuses to leave.

4. 4

   Pucci Palace

   5min

   One bricked-up window on this Renaissance facade is not a renovation. It is a punishment. A conspiracy against the Medici was plotted here. Cosimo found out. The window has never opened since.

5. 5

   Piazza Del Duomo

   10min

   An Easter Sunday assassination inside the cathedral. A lightning bolt that toppled the golden ball from Brunelleschi's dome. A demon's signature carved into the marble. The Duomo holds more than prayers.

6. 6

   Stop 6

   5min

   Built to outshine the Medici by a family they had previously exiled, the Palazzo Strozzi nearly bankrupted its owner before he finished it. Someone died here under unclear circumstances. The courtyard still echoes at night.

7. 7

   Stop 7

   5min

   In 1216, a broken engagement became a murder on Ponte Vecchio that split Florence into Guelphs and Ghibellines for decades. Dante blamed it for cursing the city. The families involved lived right here.

8. 8

   Ponte Santa Trinita

   5min

   The Germans blew this bridge apart in 1944. Florence spent years recovering its stones from the Arno riverbed and rebuilt it exactly as it was. The head of Spring was missing for sixteen years before they found it in the silt.

Before you go

Location