Le Murate: the prison turned piazza
A former prison now full of café tables, a library roof terrace, and the lanes nobody photographs. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Le Murate
A convent walled-up since the 1400s — the name means 'the walled-in women' — then a prison until 1985, now flats, studios and a café around an open courtyard. Sit at a table where cell doors used to be. The plaques on the walls quote the prisoners who scratched on them.

2. Caffè Letterario Le Murate
The café-bookshop in the old prison wing, with talks, a small stage and tables out in the cortile. Come for a coffee in the afternoon when it's calm; come back after dark and it's the quarter's living room. You're sitting inside a cell block and it doesn't feel like one.

3. Via Ghibellina lanes
Walk west on Via Ghibellina and slip into the side streets — workshops, a frame-maker, washing strung between shutters. This is residential Florence, lived-in and unbothered. No view to tick off; the point is that nobody is selling you anything.

4. Biblioteca delle Oblate
A former convent turned public library, and the secret is the top-floor café terrace looking straight at Brunelleschi's dome. Anyone can go up — you don't need a library card for the terrace. The best free view of the *cupola* in the city, with a coffee in hand.

5. Casa Buonarroti
The house Michelangelo's descendants turned into a shrine, holding two of his earliest marble reliefs. Small, rarely crowded, a quiet counterweight to the library's view. Skip it if you're museumed-out; the façade and the street are worth the detour anyway.

6. Piazza Santa Croce (back corner)
Arrive at the basilica square from its quiet eastern edge, not the tourist front. Hang back by the corner and watch the piazza do its thing — the calcio storico is played here in June. The bus into the centre is a short walk on.

Le Murate: the prison turned piazza