Via de' Tornabuoni has been the address in Florence for five hundred years, and the short walk down it to the river is the city showing you exactly where its money and its ambition lived. Do it in the late afternoon, when the light slides along the pietra forte and the shopfronts switch their lamps on.
Start at Palazzo Strozzi, the rusticated cube Filippo Strozzi built to out-Medici the Medici — walk its full perimeter, then step into the courtyard for nothing. From there the street runs south past the old banking houses, the names on the doorbells now luxury houses instead. Watch the doorways above the windows; that's where the power sat. At the corner, Palazzo Spini Feroni keeps its medieval battlements, a memory of when these families fought in the streets.
Slip into Santa Trinita for Ghirlandaio's Sassetti Chapel, where the saints wear Florentine faces. Then the Colonna della Giustizia, hauled up from a Roman bath, and out onto Ponte Santa Trinita — rebuilt stone by salvaged stone after 1944. Stand at the middle and look upstream to Ponte Vecchio. That's the walk's last gift, and it's free.
