Santa Croce is where Florence buries its great dead and still teaches its old trades, and the walk works because the two sit side by side — the pantheon and the workshop, a few steps apart. Two and a half kilometres, best in the morning before the basilica fills and the artisan lanes shut for lunch.
Start in the long piazza the friars used for preaching — and where the city still stages calcio storico, the bare-knuckle Renaissance football, each June. The basilica is the anchor: Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli down the nave, Giotto's frescoes in the Bardi chapel, a 19th-century marble face on a 13th-century church. Behind it, the Scuola del Cuoio, the leather school in the friars' old dormitory, where you can watch the cutting and gilding done by hand.
Then the lanes. Via Torta curves because it follows a buried Roman amphitheatre; walk the bend and you're reading the city's first plan. North into the Sant'Ambrogio grid of workshops, then west along Via dell'Agnolo toward the centre and the long walk back to Santa Maria Novella and the trains.
