How to Get Free Admission to Museums in Italy

Date: June 3, 2018
Location: Florence, Italy
B.A.Livin’ Savings: €34 per person (easy to save even more)

The Free Museum Trick

On the 1st Sunday of each month, a wonderful thing happens in Italy: the state museums in Italy are free for everyone! You can save a lot of money by visiting on those days, or check out museums you wouldn’t have normally gone to.

This post is going to focus on the state museums in Florence. The state museums are:

• Uffizi Gallery
• Academia Gallery
• Bargello National Museum
• The Medici Chapels
• Museum of San Marco
• The Pitti Palace
• The Boboli Gardens
• Museum of Palazzo Davanzati
• Museum of Casa Martelli

The Palazzo Pitti and Gardens post describes how to save money on entry to The Pitti Palace. We weren’t sure we were going to have enough time to do the palace and gardens, along with all the other museums we had planned for the first Sunday of the month, so we paid to visit those earlier in the week.

On Sunday, June 3, 2018 we visited three museums and saved €34 per person! For many people, that is equivalent to a nice dinner out in Florence. We only spent the afternoon going to museums, so if you spent all day touring, you could easily visit more museums and save more money.

The one thing you should remain flexible on is the order of museums that you choose to visit; because museums are free for everyone on this first Sunday, the lines can become longer than usual, so walk around and assess lines at various times throughout the day to help you reduce the amount of time you’ll be waiting.

Our Free Museum Experience

At around noon we went to the Uffizi Gallery, but the line was too long for our liking, so we decided to try again later. We went to scope out the location of the Museum of Palazzo Davanzati. On our way over we passed a procession in the Piazza della Signoria.

The Museum of Palazzo Davanzati opens at 1:15 pm on Sundays, so it wasn’t open yet when we arrived. We went to a café, had lunch and read. At 2 pm we went back to the Museum of Palazzo Davanzati and there was no line to get it; we got our free tickets and started the self-guided tour.

Here is the Parrot Room:

The Peacock Bedroom:

I enjoyed seeing the sewing tools:

The needle work was also quite interesting. There were some from the U.S. on display:

After the Museum of Palazzo Davanzati, we walked back to check how the line was at the Uffizi Gallery. It was much shorter (around 3:30 pm) so we waited for 30 minutes and were soon inside. Inside the museum was not as busy as I expected.

The largest crowds were around Sala del Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and two Leonardo da Vinci paintings.

After the Uffizi Gallery, we next wandered over to the Academia Gallery. The Academia Gallery was built to house Michelangelo’s David, so we were nervous that the line may be outrageous. However, the line was very short and in less than 15 minutes we were inside. As soon as you enter and go around the corner, the famous statue of David is front and center:

Another highlight is Michelangelo’s unfinished Prigioni sculpture.

The David statue is much bigger than I was expecting.

That concluded our day of free(!) museums. We likely would not have gone to the Uffizi Gallery if we had to pay the full price of admission, so it was great that we were able to get some additional sights in that we hadn’t planned on. We saw each of the rooms, but didn’t spend much time in any single room.

As we previously mentioned, this first-Sunday-of-the-month trick is a fantastic perk if you happen to be visiting on that day, and if you dedicated a full day to seeing museums, you could easily fit in more museums than we did.