Florence Safety Tips

Yes, and it is worth being precise about why the question keeps getting asked. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's advice for Italy — the wording read on 29 August 2026 — is that crime levels are generally low but that there are higher levels of petty crime, particularly bag-snatching and pickpocketing, in city centres and at major tourist attractions. It advises keeping sight of your belongings, being wary of thieves using distraction techniques, not carrying all your valuables together, and taking particular care on public transport, in crowded areas and at main train stations.

That is the whole risk profile in one paragraph, and it describes Florence exactly. The historic centre is small, densely walked and busy until late; the streets are overlooked on all sides; violent street crime against visitors is not the pattern here. What the city does have is an enormous concentration of distracted people carrying money in a few hundred metres of pavement, and a professional class of people who work that concentration.

So the honest advice is not to be nervous. Walk at night. Eat late. Take the last tram. Just carry your bag the way a Florentine carries theirs — in front, closed, and not on the back of a café chair — and treat any stranger who initiates physical contact with your hands as the start of a transaction rather than a friendship.

The counter to every row in this table is the same: keep walking, keep your hands in your pockets, and say no in one word without breaking stride. Rudeness is not required; stopping is what costs money.

One further pattern that is not a scam but is worth naming: the street sellers along the arcades and the bridges who will place a scarf, a bag or a selfie stick into your hands. This is a sale, not a theft, and the same rule ends it — do not take the object. Nothing on this list involves a threat, and none of it needs a police report.

It needs a flat no.

Pickpocketing in Florence is a crowd trade, so it happens exactly where the crowds are compressed: the small electric C1 and C2 buses that thread the centre, the number 12 up to the viewpoint when it is full of visitors, the pavements and platforms around Santa Maria Novella station, the market streets around San Lorenzo, and the tight spots inside Piazza del Duomo and on Ponte Vecchio where a moving crowd has to slow down.

The method is not a film. It is contact and distraction: a bump on a step, a pushed-open bag on a bus while somebody in front of you stops suddenly, a coat over an arm, a group of people who all seem to be trying to get past you at once. The FCDO's phrasing — thieves using distraction techniques — is the entire technique.

Six habits that make it a non-event. Carry a bag across your body, zip to the front, with a hand resting on it in any crowd. Split your money: one card and a little cash on you, the rest in the hotel safe. Never put a phone in a back pocket or on a café table. Do not hang a bag on the back of a chair, especially on a terrace facing a street. At the station, do not put a bag down between your feet while reading the departures board — put it against a wall and stand in front of it. And when somebody bumps you hard enough to notice, check your pockets right then, not later.

If it happens anyway: report it. You file a denuncia at a state police or Carabinieri station, and you will need it for any insurance claim. Note the FCDO's warning about the exception that catches people out — if your passport is stolen, the police report itself is not a document that lets you leave Italy, so a stolen passport means contacting your consulate for an emergency travel document, not simply flying home with a piece of paper from the police.

Everything above costs you a bracelet's worth of annoyance. This is the one that arrives as a real bill, and it catches careful people, because nothing goes wrong at the time.

The historic centre is a limited-traffic zone. Camera gates read the plate of every vehicle that crosses the line, and they are live Monday to Friday from 7:30 to 20:00 and Saturday from 7:30 to 16:00, off on Sundays and public holidays, with an additional summer night zone Thursday to Saturday from 23:00 to 03:00, running from the first Thursday of April to the first Sunday of October. Cross a gate without a permit and a violation is recorded silently. There is no barrier, no siren, and quite often no visible sign that you have done anything at all.

What happens next is a pipeline. The Municipal Police of Florence has contracted the sanctioning procedure to a company, Safety21, which runs the fines administration and the payment channel; its information portal is info.myfines.it. For a hire car, the notice goes to the rental company as the registered keeper, the rental company identifies you as the driver from the contract and passes your details on, and it typically bills you an administration fee for doing so. The fine itself then reaches your home address, in the post, often several months after the trip and sometimes close to a year later. Each separate gate you crossed is a separate violation with its own notice.

How to avoid the whole thing. If the hotel is inside the zone, give reception your plate and your arrival time on arrival — the hotel transmits it to the Municipal Police, and that is the mechanism that makes a guest's crossing legitimate. Better, do not drive in at all: park in one of the edge-of-city car parks linked to the centre by tram and bus, and walk. The zone's hours, the parking and the transport that replaces the car are all set out on the ZTL hours and parking in full.

If a notice does arrive, it can be paid by card from abroad through the municipal police's own payment system, and the contacts for a query are [email protected] and +39 055 0353400, staffed Monday to Friday 8:30 to 17:30 and Saturday 8:30 to 13:30, Italian time. No penalty amount is published on the official pages we read, so we print none — do not trust a figure from a forum either.

Taxis are taken at a rank or ordered by phone or app; they are not hailed in the street the way they are in London or New York. The meter starts when the taxi sets off to collect you, which is why a booked cab arrives with a figure already on the clock.

Two honest notes. There is no official fixed fare from the airport on the tariff table we read — a round figure circulates in the press and on forums, but it is not on the city's own document, so treat any quoted flat price as the driver's offer rather than a published rate, and ask for the meter. And the tram runs the same journey on an ordinary urban ticket in about twenty minutes, which is the comparison that matters at the arrivals door.

Two lines on a bill generate more angry reviews of Florence than everything above put together, and neither is illegal. The coperto is a fixed charge per person for the table setting and the bread; some tourist-facing places also add a servizio percentage. Both have to be written on the menu before you order, which is the protection you actually have — read the bottom of the first page before you sit down, and if the charges are not printed anywhere, that in itself is the warning.

The second surprise is the steak. Bistecca alla fiorentina is priced by weight, not by portion, so a menu price that looks modest is the price of 100 grams, and the piece the kitchen brings out may be well over a kilo. Agree the weight before it is cooked. Both of these, with the sourcing and the arithmetic, are on what the coperto is.

The genuine complaint to make, when it happens, is a bill with charges that were never displayed. Ask for a receipt — a proper fiscal receipt is mandatory in Italy and the restaurant, not you, is penalised for not issuing one — and if the numbers are wrong, that receipt is what a complaint to the municipal police is based on.

One number covers everything. Calls to 112 are answered by a unified response centre that establishes what has happened, locates the caller and routes the call to the police, the Carabinieri, the fire service, the coast guard or the ambulance service.

There is no separate tourist police force in Florence, whatever a guidebook may say. Two forces matter to a visitor: the Polizia Municipale, which is the city's own force and handles traffic, fines and licensing, and the state police and Carabinieri, who take crime reports. If you are lost rather than in trouble, the city's tourist information offices — at Piazza Stazione and Via Cavour — are the right door, and they are staffed in English.

The likeliest thing to spoil a day here is not crime, it is July. The centre is stone from wall to wall and reflects heat back at you all afternoon; the free fountains and a refillable bottle solve more problems than any other item you can carry. Museums with red-alert heat rules cut parts of a visit — the tower at Palazzo Vecchio restricts access on the worst days, and Orsanmichele closes its upper floor once the indoor temperature climbs — so an afternoon plan in August should have an indoor fallback.

Underfoot, the paving is uneven almost everywhere and pavements in the old streets are narrow enough that two people cannot pass. Flat shoes are not a style choice here. Scooters and delivery vans use the same streets you are walking in, so look before you step off a kerb; the centre is pedestrianised in places but not everywhere, and drivers in a limited-traffic zone are moving faster than they should.

At night the centre is well used and well lit. The two streets people ask about — the station approach and the park strip behind it — are unremarkable in the evening and simply quiet after midnight; the sensible move there is the same one you would make in any city, which is to walk the busier parallel street. Cash is still useful in small quantities for markets and the tripe carts, cards work everywhere else, and ATMs inside a bank lobby are preferable to a free-standing machine offering a conversion rate on the screen — always decline the conversion and be charged in euro.