Le Cascine: the long avenues and the Arno bank
Florence's great riverside park — the plane-tree avenues, the Sunday market ground, and an Indian prince's tomb. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Piazzale delle Cascine
Step off the T1 tram and the park opens straight ahead in a wide gravel avenue. This is the western end and the calmer one — runners, dog-walkers, the odd horse. Start walking east along the main avenue and let the city fall away behind you.

2. The Arno bank path
Drop down to the river side of the park, where a path runs along the *Arno* under the trees. Quieter than the central avenue, with the water on your right and rowing crews out early. Walk it as far as it holds, then cut back up to the avenue.

3. Monument to the Indian Prince
An odd, moving thing in the middle of a Tuscan park: the marble memorial to *Rajaram Chuttraputti*, a young maharaja of Kolhapur who died in Florence in 1870 and was cremated here by the river, per his rites. Read the plaque — it's the strangest history on the walk.

4. The market ground (Piazza Vittorio Veneto end)
The broad open space at the eastern end that fills on Tuesday mornings with the city's biggest open-air market — clothes, cheese, plants, the lot. On any other day it's just a vast gravel clearing, which has its own appeal. Time it for Tuesday if you want the noise.

5. Piramide / the old ice house
Tucked in the eastern reaches, the *Piramide*, an 18th-century pyramid-roofed icehouse where snow was once packed to keep the Grand Duke's kitchens cool through summer. A small absurd folly worth the short detour off the avenue.

6. Ponte alla Vittoria and out
The park narrows to its eastern tip by the bridge, where the tram and the city pick up again. A good place to end — bench, river, the skyline starting to reassemble. The Alamanni stop for the T1 back into town is a couple of minutes on.

Le Cascine: the long avenues and the Arno bank