Florence: choose the airport and the district together

Florence Airport (FLR), a short taxi ride from the centre, is the most convenient arrival for the routes it serves, but its runway length limits it to mostly short- and medium-haul connections. Pisa International Airport (PSA), around an hour southwest by train or road, carries a broader range of international and long-haul-connecting routes and is often the more realistic option for travellers coming from outside Europe. Bologna’s airport (BLQ), also about an hour away, connects onward to Florence by a high-speed rail link of around 35 minutes and is worth considering when its own route network suits the itinerary better.

Confirming which of the three airports a booking actually uses shapes the first transfer meaningfully — a short taxi from Peretola, versus a train connection from Pisa or Bologna — and is worth doing before the rest of the stay is planned.

The Centro Storico holds the Duomo, the Uffizi and the Accademia within a few minutes’ walk of almost any hotel inside it, at the cost of the city’s highest density of day-trippers around its central squares. The Oltrarno, across the river, keeps a quieter, more residential pace with the Pitti Palace and a concentration of artisan workshops, while San Lorenzo and San Marco sit close to the market and the Accademia with a slightly more local, less postcard-perfect feel. For a stay weighted toward the surrounding countryside, a base in the Chianti hills or the hill town of Fiesole trades walking convenience for a genuine rural setting a short drive from the centre.

Naming which of these a stay is built around — dense historic-centre convenience, a quieter artisan neighbourhood, or a countryside base with the city as a day trip — tends to produce a more coherent hotel choice than assuming any address inside the old walls serves the same purpose.

Florence’s historic centre is compact enough that a determined visitor can walk between the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Accademia and the Ponte Vecchio within a single unhurried day — a genuinely different proposition from a sprawling capital where the sights sit hours apart. That same compactness makes it easy to underestimate how much of the wider Tuscan experience — Chianti’s wineries, San Gimignano’s towers, the Cinque Terre’s coastline — sits an hour or more beyond the city and needs its own planned day rather than an afternoon add-on.

A stay that decides early whether it is primarily a Florence visit with an optional countryside day, or a Tuscany trip that happens to start in Florence, tends to make better use of both the city’s own density and the region’s distance.