Day Trips from Florence

The best day trip from Florence, and the one to take if you only take one. Siena is a complete medieval city inside its walls — a cathedral, a shell-shaped piazza that the city is built around, and streets that go on being interesting after you have seen the famous things. That matters more than it sounds: most day trips from Florence are one monument with a town attached, and this is the reverse.

Go by bus, not by train. This is the practical heart of the Siena decision and it inverts the obvious. There is a direct regional train, and Siena’s station is around two kilometres north of the historic centre and well below it, so you finish the journey with a bus, a chain of escalators through a shopping centre, or a steep walk. The Autolinee Toscane rapid coach leaves from Florence’s bus station beside Santa Maria Novella and sets down by the walls, minutes from the centre. Same city, materially different arrival.

Do not pair it with anything. Siena is routinely sold as half of a day that also takes in San Gimignano, or Chianti, or both. Those days exist and they work, but they give you an hour or two in Siena, which is enough to see the piazza and not enough to have been there. If Siena is the reason you are going, give it the day.

The one pairing on this page that is not overreach. Pisa is a half day and everybody knows it. The Field of Miracles is a walled green with four buildings on it, it is a short walk or a bus from Pisa Centrale, and once you have seen the tower, climbed it if you booked, and looked properly at the cathedral and the baptistery, you are done well before lunch. A whole day in Pisa is a day with a hole in it.

Lucca fills the hole, and the geometry works. Florence to Pisa is direct, Pisa to Lucca is a short direct regional hop, and Lucca back to Florence is direct again. Three legs, no awkward change, and a triangle rather than a there-and-back. That is unusual, and it is why this pairing is worth doing when most are not.

Lucca is the better town. It is walled, unhurried, largely flat, and its wall is a wide tree-lined path you can walk or cycle the whole way round — which is a genuinely different thing to do after a morning of queuing. Several people who go for Pisa come back talking about Lucca.

Take them in that order. Pisa in the morning is materially better than Pisa in the afternoon, and Lucca is the more pleasant place to be as the day cools.

Worth seeing, and a connection day however you do it. San Gimignano is the hill town with the towers, and it earns its reputation — a skyline of medieval stone towers above vineyards is not something you see elsewhere. It is also small. Three or four hours is a generous visit.

It has no railway station. The town’s own tourist office says so plainly: you take a train to Poggibonsi and a bus from there, or a bus the whole way from Florence. The bus leg is short and runs regularly. But it means the day has a joint in it, and if you are going to stage a day anyway, it is worth asking whether the countryside around it is really what you want.

Which is the honest verdict: San Gimignano alone is a lot of movement for a small town, and San Gimignano as one stop on a countryside day is the version most people enjoy more. Go independently if the towers are specifically the draw. Take it as part of a road day if what you actually want is Tuscany.

The countryside is the one case where a car or an organised day is solving a real problem rather than selling you one. Chianti is the hill country between Florence and Siena. The Val d’Orcia is further south, and it is the landscape most people are picturing when they say Tuscany — the cypress avenues, the ridge-top farmhouses, the hill towns with long views. Neither is a place. Both are areas.

That is the whole of the transport problem. There is no station to arrive at, the things worth stopping for are strung out along small roads, and the distance between two of them is twenty minutes by car and most of an afternoon by any scheduled service. A rented car solves it. A driver solves it. An organised day solves it, and is the only one of the three that also lets everybody drink.

Which of those suits you is a separate question from whether the countryside is worth a day, and it is not one this page answers — choosing between organised countryside days is its own subject. What this page can tell you is that the countryside is the only entry on this list where going independently is the harder option rather than the better one, and that a day spent driving between three hill towns is a genuinely different trip from a day spent in one city.

One caution. The Val d’Orcia is a long way south of Florence — far enough that a day trip there is mostly a driving day. If it is the landscape you came for, it is better reached from a base further south, or given nights of its own. Chianti is the version of this that works comfortably as a day from Florence.

The most underrated day trip from Florence, and the fastest. High-speed trains cross the Apennines in around half an hour, which makes Bologna quicker to reach from Florence than most of Tuscany — and it is not in Tuscany at all. You can leave after breakfast and be walking under the porticoes before the day has properly started.

What you get is a large, working city rather than a preserved one: forty kilometres of covered arcades, a university that has been running since the middle ages, food that Italians travel for, and comparatively few people doing what you are doing. After several days of Florence’s Renaissance density it is a genuine change of register rather than more of the same.

The catch is that the fast trains are reserved and priced like an intercity journey rather than a regional hop, so this is the one day trip here that rewards booking ahead. Book the high-speed service specifically — the slow route over the mountains is a different and much longer proposition.

Technically possible, and a poor use of a day. This is the entry most likely to disappoint, and it is on every list because the photographs are extraordinary. The villages deserve the attention. The day trip does not.

Reaching the villages from Florence normally means changing trains on the outward and return journeys, with additional local trains if you want to see more than one village. It is possible in a day, but much of the usable time is spent in transit; Cinque Terre earns an overnight.

A day trip also puts you there in the middle of the day, which is the part of it the villages are least suited to — five small settlements on a narrow strip of coast, joined by one local line, with everyone arriving and leaving inside the same few hours.

Give it a night, or two. The Cinque Terre is a place where the good hours are early and late — the villages empty out, the light drops onto the water, and the walking between them stops being a scramble against a train you have to catch. Everything that makes it worth going is happening outside the window a day trip gives you.

If a day is genuinely all you have and you are set on going, the way to make it least bad is to pick one village rather than trying to see the five, and to accept the day as a long one. But the honest recommendation is to move it out of your Florence days and give it nights of its own on the way north or south.