Via de' Tornabuoni: the luxury spine to the river
Florence's grandest street, the Strozzi rusticated block, and a bridge that was rebuilt stone by stone. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Palazzo Strozzi
Start at the great rusticated cube — Filippo Strozzi's attempt to out-build the Medici, finished long after he died. Walk the full perimeter to feel the weight of it, then duck into the courtyard, which is free and almost always open for the exhibitions upstairs.

2. Via de' Tornabuoni
The luxury street, then and now. Ferragamo, Gucci, the old banking houses behind the shopfronts. You don't have to buy anything; walk it slowly southward and read the palace doorways above the window displays, which is where the real money always was.

3. Palazzo Spini Feroni
The battlemented thirteenth-century block on the corner at Piazza Santa Trinita, now the Ferragamo flagship with a shoe museum in the basement. The crenellations are real medieval defence, not decoration — a reminder this street was once a battleground between families.

4. Santa Trinita
The church with the plain Buontalenti front that hides a Gothic interior. Slip in for the Sassetti Chapel — Ghirlandaio's frescoes use real Florentine faces and the Piazza della Signoria as a backdrop. Free, and usually quiet in the late afternoon.

5. Colonna della Giustizia
The granite column in the middle of the piazza came from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome — a gift from a pope, hauled north and topped with a porphyry figure of Justice. Pause here; you're standing where the street pivots toward the water.

6. Ponte Santa Trinita
End on the most elegant bridge in the city, its three flattened arches blown up in 1944 and rebuilt from the original stones dredged from the river. Stand at the centre for the view of *Ponte Vecchio* upstream — the best free view in Florence, and you'll have walked to it.

Via de' Tornabuoni: the luxury spine to the river