Instead of the Uffizi: the art of Florence and Tuscany far from the queues
Endless queues at the Uffizi? Museums, cloisters and frescoes of Florence and Tuscany where you can take in art at your leisure, often for free.
The Uffizi remains one of the world's greatest picture galleries, but anyone who's been there in high season knows what it means: queues out in the open, congested rooms, ten seconds in front of Botticelli's Venus before someone nudges you aside. Looking for an alternative to the Uffizi doesn't mean giving up the art of Florence, quite the opposite: the city and Tuscany are full of masterpieces you can look at in silence, sometimes alone, often at a reduced price or free. Here's where to go.
Art in Florence
A few steps from Piazza San Marco, on Via Cavour, opens the Chiostro dello Scalzo: a small courtyard entirely frescoed by Andrea del Sarto with the Stories of Saint John the Baptist, painted in grisaille, that is, in an earth-toned monochrome that imitates sculpture. It's one of the peaks of the Florentine Renaissance, entry is free and the hours are limited (mornings, a few days a week: it's best to check them beforehand). Often you go in with just two or three other people.
A block away lies the real ace up the sleeve. The Museum of San Marco holds the world's largest collection of works by Fra Angelico, and above all the 44 Dominican friars' cells, each frescoed one by one: every monk had his own scene from the life of Christ to pray before. The Annunciation at the top of the stairs is as famous as any panel in the Uffizi, but here you contemplate it in the silence of the convent designed by Michelozzo. In the same quarter of the city it's worth lingering between the botanical garden and the silent courtyards of San Marco, a stone's throw from the Galleria dell'Accademia but in an entirely different mood. And if you're after sculpture, the Bargello (Donatello, Michelangelo, the Della Robbia) rivals the Uffizi and is seen with half the crowd; for frescoes, Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel remains a lesson in painting with no queue.
Beyond Florence
Beyond Florence, the Tuscany of art expands. In the Valtiberina, Anghiari gives its name to the 1440 battle that Leonardo painted in Palazzo Vecchio and then lost: the Museum of the Battle tells its story with drawings and copies, while the nearby Palazzo Taglieschi keeps a Madonna by Jacopo della Quercia and a Nativity by Andrea della Robbia. From here Sansepolcro and Monterchi, home of Piero della Francesca, are within a whisker: his Polyptych of the Misericordia and the Madonna del Parto can be seen in civic museums where there's no queue. It's a first-rate Renaissance itinerary that almost no one thinks to set against Florence.
Towards Siena, art becomes architecture. The Cistercian abbey of San Galgano is a Gothic cathedral without a roof, open to the sky; just above it, the Montesiepi rotunda holds the saint's sword in the stone and the fourteenth-century frescoes of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, with a Maestà and a scene of Galgano offering his sword to Saint Michael. Sienese painting of the Trecento in the middle of the fields, and there's no wretched ticket to book three weeks in advance.
Beyond the Renaissance
Tuscan art, though, doesn't begin with the Renaissance. In the tuff Maremma, the Vie Cave of Sovana are corridors dug by the Etruscans into the rock, up to twenty metres high, beside necropolises with monumental tombs: it's environmental sculpture two thousand five hundred years old. Nearby, Pitigliano weaves together Etruscan crag, carved-out lanes and the "Little Jerusalem" of its ghetto, with the synagogue and ovens in the rock. To close the Maremma tour, the walled village of Pereta and, at dawn before the coaches, the free thermal springs of Saturnia tell the same Tuscany from another angle.
And if you want art that catches you off guard, in the Valdarno Sammezzano awaits, the nineteenth-century Orientalist castle with its Moorish halls in impossible colours: a fragile masterpiece, open only on special occasions, which proves that "art in Tuscany" doesn't mean only the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Practical advice
One practical tip holds for all these places: go in low season and early in the morning. January, February and November empty even the Florentine galleries, and many of these minor sites never really close for overtourism. Art, then, becomes once again a one-to-one dialogue.
Practical guides for Siena
Practical info
When is the best time to visit Instead of the Uffizi?
The recommended time is January, February, March and November, when it is less crowded.
Where is Instead of the Uffizi?
Instead of the Uffizi is located in Italy.
