Piazzale Michelangelo

Florence is a city of narrow streets and high walls, and from most of it you see the Duomo only in fragments — a slice of marble at the end of an alley, a curve of red tile over a rooftop. Piazzale Michelangelo is where the whole city finally assembles itself. From the broad terrace on the hill above the Oltrarno the view runs across the Arno and its bridges, the Ponte Vecchio among them, to the great dome of the cathedral, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Bargello and the slender octagonal bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina — a sweep that runs all the way from Forte Belvedere to Santa Croce. Beyond the roofs the northern hills close the picture, with Fiesole and Settignano at their centre.

The terrace is not an old belvedere but a piece of nineteenth-century city planning. In the years when Florence was briefly the capital of the newly united Italy, the city set about a sweeping programme of renewal, and the architect Giuseppe Poggi laid out the Viale dei Colli, a tree-lined avenue of some eight kilometres winding up through the hills south of the river. The piazzale, completed in 1869, was its climax, conceived as a monument to Michelangelo. Poggi designed a neoclassical loggia at the back of the terrace that was meant to house a museum of the artist's works; the museum never came, and the building now holds a restaurant. In 1911 an inscription on the terrace wall honoured the architect with a quiet boast: look around you — this is his monument.

At the centre stands a bronze copy of Michelangelo's David, dragged up the hill by nine pairs of oxen on 25 June 1873, with bronze versions of the four allegories of the times of day from the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo around its base. Here, unlike the marble original in its gallery, the figure stands in open air with the whole city spread behind it. Come near sunset, when the light slides along the Arno and the stone of the city turns honey-coloured, or climb on higher up the hill to the Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte.

Getting there

The piazzale sits on the hill south of the Arno in Florence, above the San Niccolò district in the Oltrarno; the Campo di Marte neighbourhood is about 2 km away across the river. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR), is about 7 km away. On foot, the monumental stairways of the Rampe del Poggi climb from Piazza Poggi in San Niccolò; by road, it is on the Viale Michelangelo, part of the Viale dei Colli.