Florence Events Calendar

Read the last column first if you are choosing dates: it is the only one that tells you whether an event is a reason to come, a reason to book early, or a reason to be somewhere else that morning.

Two structural things this table cannot show. First, the Easter dates move: the Scoppio del Carro is Easter Sunday, so it lands anywhere between 22 March and 25 April, and everything else in Holy Week moves with it. Second, the free museum Sunday is the first Sunday of every month, in every one of those rows, and it is the single most crowded museum day of each month as a result.

This is the oldest thing on the Florentine calendar and the strangest. On Easter Sunday morning a cart the Florentines call the brindellone — tall, wooden, and stacked with fireworks — is pulled through the streets by a pair of oxen dressed with flowers, ahead of a procession of about 150 people in fifteenth-century costume: soldiers, musicians and flag-throwers. The cart stops in Piazza del Duomo, in the gap between the Baptistery and the cathedral front.

At 11:00, while the Gloria is being sung inside, the Archbishop lights the Colombina — a rocket shaped like a dove — from the holy fire at the altar. It runs out of the cathedral along a wire strung the length of the nave and out of the west door, hits the cart in the square, and sets the whole thing off. Tradition holds that if the dove flies cleanly and returns to the high altar, the year will be a good one for the city and its harvest. The city's own visitor service describes the ritual in exactly those terms.

What that means for your day. The cathedral complex does not admit visitors on Easter Sunday at all — no Dome climb, no Baptistery, nothing, so do not hold a dated ticket for that morning; the rules are on the cathedral ticket rules. The square starts filling well before 10:00 and the police close it once it is full. If you want to see the cart rather than the back of a crowd, be in the piazza by about 09:30, stand on the Baptistery side, and accept that you will be there for ninety minutes. If you would rather not, watch the procession earlier on its way through the streets, which is free of crowd control and considerably more photogenic.

Calcio Storico Fiorentino is a sixteenth-century ball game played on sand in Piazza Santa Croce by four teams that are the four historic quarters: Rossi of Santa Maria Novella, Verdi of San Giovanni, Bianchi of Santo Spirito and Azzurri of Santa Croce. Fifty-four players a side, almost no rules that a modern sport would recognise, and fifty minutes. The city's culture department publishes the draw each spring; for 2026 it listed semi-finals on 13 and 14 June and the final on 24 June.

The final date is the fixed one, and it is fixed because of the saint. 24 June is the feast of San Giovanni Battista, the patron of Florence, and the city treats it as its own holiday. The Comune's programme runs from 21 to 24 June: historical processions, masses, a river rowing competition, and then two things on the day itself. The final is played at 18:00 at Santa Croce. The fireworks — the fochi — begin at 22:00, fired from Piazzale Michelangelo across the river, and last around forty minutes.

The practical warnings are on the city's own page and they are not decorative. There are traffic restrictions across the centre on the day, and in the zones around both events glass and metal containers and alcohol are prohibited, as are any privately-let fireworks during the display. Public transport reroutes in the evening.

Where to watch the fochi: the river embankments on the north bank face the hill directly, and the stretch along Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia is the classic spot. Ponte Vecchio and the bridges fill early and get closed when they are full. The one place not to go is the Piazzale itself — the fireworks are fired from it, so the view from up there is the wrong end of the show, as where the fireworks are fired from explains. Tickets for the Calcio Storico final are sold through the Comune's own online payments portal; no price was published on the pages we read, so we print none.

On the eve of the Nativity of the Virgin, Florence fills with paper lanterns on sticks, carried mostly by children, and a good number of them end the night shot down with peashooters by other children. That is the Rificolona, and it is the most local event in this calendar — a country pilgrimage that turned into a city party.

The day begins outside the city. Pilgrims leave the Santuario dell'Impruneta at about 14:30 and walk the sixteen kilometres in to Florence. The civic procession forms at Piazza Santa Felicita in the Oltrarno and crosses the river, up Via de' Calzaiuoli to Piazza San Giovanni, past the cathedral and along Via dei Servi to Piazza Santissima Annunziata, where the festival opens at about 21:30 with the blessing of the lanterns, prizes for the best hand-made ones and live music. The Comune publishes the full route each year, and it is essentially the same route each year.

It is free, it is outdoors, it is over by about 23:00, and it is the one evening on this page where the crowd is overwhelmingly Florentine. Buy a lantern from a stall on the way — they cost a few euro — and walk with it. Neighbourhood processions run in the outer quarters on the same night if you are staying outside the walls.

Florence's music festival is one of the oldest in Europe and it is not, despite the name, confined to May. The Teatro del Maggio at Piazza Vittorio Gui 1, west of the station, runs a full opera and concert season through the year and the Festival sits inside it; the theatre's own site announces the 2027 edition as the 89th Festival, without publishing its dates at the time we read the page on 29 August 2026.

What to do about that: book direct. The theatre sells its own seats and publishes its calendar months ahead, and it is the only reliable source for both the programme and the price, neither of which we publish here because neither was on the pages we read. The auditorium is modern and acoustically serious — this is not a costumed tourist concert, it is a working opera house with a proper orchestra.

If your dates do not line up with the season, the evening concert in the tour list below is a different proposition entirely: an hour of classical music in a central venue, $40.54 and rated 4.6 from 670 reviews, bookable from abroad on a fixed date. It is the fallback, not the equivalent.

From 1 June to 30 September the Comune's culture department programmes the courtyards, gardens and cloisters of the city as venues. The 2026 edition, published as Giorni d'Estate, counted 1,268 events by 162 organisers — 100 diffuse projects, six large thematic events and nine festivals, across eleven open-air spaces.

The named festivals inside it are the ones worth planning around. Apriti Cinema screens films outdoors from the middle of June to the end of July. The Florence Dance Performing Arts Festival takes the great cloister of Santa Maria Novella from late June to late July. In September, the Firenze Jazz Festival runs 5 to 13 September, Open Air Circus 10 to 20 September, and Genius Loci closes the season 24 to 26 September.

Most of it is cheap or free, and it is the reason a July or September evening in Florence is better than the same afternoon. Programmes go up on the city's culture site through May; the venues are spread across the quarters, so check which one you are walking to before you commit to an evening.

Fortezza da Basso, north of the station, hosts them. If your dates overlap, book accommodation early and expect the neighbourhoods near the fortress and the station to be the tightest.

The practical rule: if you are travelling in January or June and your dates touch one of those four windows, price the room first and the flights second. January outside the fair weeks is the cheapest fortnight of the Florentine year; January inside them is not. The neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood version of that trade-off sits on what the fair weeks do to room rates.

Piazza Santa Croce takes a German-style Christmas market — the Weihnachtsmarkt — with more than fifty wooden chalets selling crafts, mulled wine and food from across Europe. The organisers, ANVA and Confesercenti Firenze, with the patronage of the city and the region, published the twenty-fourth edition as running 15 November to 21 December, open continuously from 10:00 to 23:00.

Note what that means: the market closes four days before Christmas. Travellers who arrive on 23 December expecting a Christmas market find an empty square. The city's own decorations, the lit streets and the crib displays in the churches run through the holiday, but the chalets do not.

Around it, the winter calendar is thin and that is the appeal. Museums are at their emptiest between the market closing and the first Sunday in January; the cathedral complex and the state museums shut on 25 December and 1 January, so plan those two days around churches, walking and a long lunch. Epiphany, 6 January, closes several churches as well — Santa Maria Novella and San Lorenzo among them.

One line to keep: free does not mean easy. On the first Sunday of the month the state museums do not take the usual paid bookings, so the queue at the gate is the entry system, and the Uffizi and Accademia are at their worst.

The scheduling advice that follows from the table: never put the Uffizi or the Accademia on a first Sunday if you can put them on a Tuesday, and never put anything ticketed on Easter Sunday or on either of the two closed holidays. Italy's national holidays — 1 and 6 January, Easter Monday, 25 April, 1 May, 2 June, 15 August, 1 November, 8 December, 25 and 26 December — shut public offices and thin out transport, and 24 June adds a local one that the rest of the country does not keep.