Florence

Bistecca alla fiorentina

A thick T-bone or porterhouse cut from Chianina cattle, grilled rare over charcoal and sold by weight.

Cut at least four to five centimetres thick from Chianina beef, the steak is grilled quickly over high heat so the outside chars while the inside stays rare — it's traditionally served rare only, and asking for it well done is considered to miss the point. It's priced and sold by weight, usually per kilo, for two or more to share.

It is the dish most identified with Florentine cooking, and the one that best explains the city's plain, ingredient-first approach to meat.

A visibly rare interior; a steak cooked through is not the traditional preparation.

Trattorie and steakhouses throughout the centre and Oltrarno.

Lampredotto

The fourth stomach chamber of a cow, slow-simmered and served in a bread roll from a street cart.

Lampredotto is simmered for hours in a broth of tomato, onion, celery and herbs until tender, then chopped and piled into a bun, often dipped in the cooking broth and topped with a green salsa verde or a spicier red sauce. It's sold from dedicated street carts, known as trippai, rather than restaurants.

It is genuine working-class Florentine street food, distinct from the tourist-facing restaurant scene.

A cart with a queue of locals at lunchtime rather than one aimed at passing tourists.

Street carts near Mercato Centrale, Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio and around Piazza dei Cimatori.

Ribollita

A thick winter soup of bread, cannellini beans and cavolo nero, traditionally reheated, or 're-boiled', from the day before.

The name reflects its origin as a way of using up leftover minestrone and stale bread: the bread is stirred through the vegetable and bean soup until it thickens almost to a stew, then reheated the next day, when the flavour is said to improve. It belongs firmly to cucina povera, Tuscany's peasant-food tradition.

It shows how much of Tuscan cooking is built around not wasting bread.

A thick, stew-like consistency rather than a thin soup, usually finished with raw olive oil.

Trattorie in the colder months; less often found in summer.

Pappa al pomodoro

A thick bread-and-tomato soup, another cucina povera dish built to use up stale bread.

Stale bread is simmered with ripe tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil until it breaks down into a thick, almost porridge-like consistency. It is a summer dish, dependent on tomatoes genuinely being in season, and is usually served warm rather than hot.

It is ribollita's summer counterpart, showing the same bread-based thrift applied to a different season's produce.

A dish clearly thickened by bread rather than a plain tomato soup.

Trattorie in summer months.

Crostini toscani

Toasted bread topped with a chicken-liver pâté, sharpened with capers and a little vin santo.

Chicken livers are cooked down with onion, anchovy and capers, sometimes loosened with a splash of vin santo or stock, then spread warm over toasted bread. It is one of the region's oldest crostini toppings and a standard starter on Tuscan menus.

It represents the offal-based side of Tuscan cooking in a much gentler form than lampredotto or trippa.

A coarse, spreadable pâté rather than a smooth, shop-bought-style paste.

Trattorie as a starter, almost universally available.

Chianti Classico

Sangiovese-based red wine from the hills between Florence and Siena, identified by its black-rooster seal.

Chianti Classico must be made mostly from Sangiovese grown within a defined zone between Florence and Siena, and bottles carrying the Gallo Nero (black rooster) seal meet the consortium's stricter standards than basic Chianti. It is the default red poured with Tuscan meat dishes across the city.

It is the wine most tied to the region's food, and the black-rooster mark is a quick way to judge quality on a menu or shelf.

By the glass with a meat-based meal, or ask a wine bar for a comparison between Chianti Classico and basic Chianti.

Restaurants and enoteche throughout the centre.

Mercato Centrale

Florence's iron-and-glass covered food market in San Lorenzo, built in 1874 and still trading on its ground floor.

Designed by Giuseppe Mengoni, the architect behind Milan's Galleria, the market's ground floor holds working butchers, fishmongers, delicatessens and greengrocers, much as it has since it opened. An upper-floor food hall of stalls for eating on-site was added in 2014, a more recent, tourist-oriented addition to the original working market below.

It shows the raw materials behind Florentine cooking, and the building itself is a piece of 19th-century market architecture in its own right.

The distinction between the ground-floor working market and the newer upstairs food hall, which serve different purposes.

Piazza del Mercato Centrale, San Lorenzo.

The Duomo complex

The cathedral, Giotto's Campanile and the Baptistery are not three separate attractions. Together they occupy the religious centre of Florence on a scale that makes the surrounding streets feel almost implausibly small.

The cathedral had been under construction for generations before Brunelleschi solved the problem of covering its enormous crossing. His dome, built from 1420 to 1436, consists of two shells and was constructed without the vast timber centring that a conventional solution would have required. You do not need to understand the engineering to appreciate the audacity: step away from the façade and look at how much building the dome has to cover.

Then leave the piazza. The most useful thing about the dome is what it does to the rest of Florence. It disappears behind buildings and then returns at the end of streets, above rooflines or from the opposite side of the Arno. Florence kept building around it, but the dome never disappeared into the ordinary roofscape.

Look for: The gap between the dome and the streets immediately around the cathedral. There is barely enough distance to take the whole thing in.

Wendelse tip: Visit the complex if you want to, but also deliberately find the dome later when you are somewhere else. It works better as part of Florence than as an isolated attraction.

Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio

Florence's civic centre is much less polite than its religious one.

Palazzo Vecchio rises straight from the square like a fortified block, with rough stone at street level and a tower pushed high above it. This was government architecture in a city where politics could be dangerous. The square outside became the place where civic power was staged publicly: speeches, ceremonies, punishment, sculpture and political theatre all accumulated here.

Walk from the narrow surrounding streets into the piazza rather than approaching with the building already in view. The sudden increase in scale is part of the experience.

Look for: How little Palazzo Vecchio tries to charm you at ground level. Its walls are heavy, openings relatively controlled and the tower deliberately dominates the surrounding roofs.

A Florentine palazzo

Choose one rather than collecting them.

Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Palazzo Strozzi and several others turn private wealth into a distinctive urban type: huge rectangular family houses occupying ordinary streets, their lower walls faced in heavy rusticated stone and their upper storeys becoming progressively calmer.

The interesting part is the contradiction. These are exceptionally wealthy buildings, but the street façade can be defensive, controlled and almost severe. Wealth is expressed through scale, stone, craftsmanship and proportion rather than acres of glass or outward-facing decoration. Palazzo Medici Riccardi is especially useful because the transition from rough lower masonry to smoother upper levels is so easy to read.

Look for: The stone changing as your eye moves upwards.

Santo Spirito

Crossing the Arno is useful partly because Florence becomes less overwhelming.

Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito gives you Renaissance architecture without the visual competition of the Duomo precinct. Its interior is governed by repeated columns, arches and measured proportions rather than spectacle piled onto spectacle.

Come here after the monumental centre. The contrast helps: Florence's architectural revolution wasn't only about building bigger. It was also about making space feel ordered.

The building you keep finding

The best architectural experience in Florence may happen after you've finished visiting the Duomo.

Once you know the dome's shape, it becomes an orientation point. A fragment appears above a roof; a street unexpectedly frames it; across the Arno the whole cathedral finally separates itself from the buildings around it.

That is worth noticing because the dome was conceived as part of Florence's civic and religious identity, not as an object to be photographed from one designated viewpoint. No architecture walk is prescribed here. Florence already makes you move repeatedly between confined streets and oversized monuments. Let that happen naturally.

Florence is built from stone you start to recognise

Two names recur in descriptions of Florentine architecture: pietra forte, the brownish sandstone strongly associated with exterior walls and palaces, and pietra serena, the cooler grey stone used particularly effectively for architectural details and Renaissance interiors.

You don't need to identify every block correctly. The useful thing is simply to notice how much Florence relies on exposed stone, and how differently rough masonry and precisely cut grey architectural elements behave.

The palace façade is deliberately withholding

Florentine palaces often tell you surprisingly little about the life behind them.

Heavy street walls conceal courtyards and more refined internal spaces. When a palazzo entrance is open to visitors, notice the transition: street → dark entrance → ordered courtyard.

The private building becomes more generous once you are inside it.