10 Unique Things to Do in Florence - Beyond the Museums
- Silvia Madari
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
Florence has more art per square metre than almost anywhere on earth - but the city's most memorable experiences happen outside the gallery walls. If you want to go home with something that can't be photographed through glass, read on.
Why Florence Rewards the Curious Traveller
The Uffizi is extraordinary. The Accademia, with Michelangelo's David, will stop you in your tracks. But Florence has always been a city of makers - goldsmiths, leatherworkers, winemakers, perfumers. The workshops that lined the Oltrarno in the Renaissance are still here, still alive, still producing things you can touch, taste, and smell.
The tourists who leave Florence truly changed are the ones who found their way into them. Here are ten experiences that will make your trip unforgettable - and genuinely unusual.
1. Create Your Own Signature Perfume at a Florence Perfume Workshop
Of all the hands-on experiences Florence has to offer, a perfume-making workshop is one of the most intimate and personal. You sit alongside a trained perfumer, learn the language of top notes, heart notes, and base notes, and then — guided but entirely free — you blend your own signature scent.
At Feel Toscana, the workshop takes place in a beautiful studio in the heart of Florence. You spend around two hours learning the principles of perfumery, experimenting with raw materials — woods, florals, spices, resins — and building a fragrance that is entirely your own. At the end, you take home your creation in a personalised bottle with your chosen name on the label.
It's an experience that engages all your senses, connects you to Florence's artisan heritage, and produces something genuinely unique — a memory you can literally carry with you.
Perfect for: Solo travellers, couples, hen parties, family groups, and anyone who wants to bring home something irreplaceable.
2. Wander the Oltrarno at Golden Hour
Cross the Ponte Vecchio and you enter a different Florence. The Oltrarno - literally 'beyond the Arno' - is the artisan quarter, quieter and more residential than the centro storico, lined with workshops, wine bars, and trattorias where locals actually eat.
Visit at golden hour, when the light turns the stone facades the colour of honey, and walk without a map. You'll find tiny piazzas, ancient churches, and a city that feels lived-in rather than curated. If you'd like to read more about it, Wander Your Way wrote a very detailed post about it.
3. Join a Guided Food Market Tour at the Mercato Centrale
Florence's Mercato Centrale is two floors of sensory overload - fresh pasta, aged Chianina beef, truffles from the Mugello hills, Chianti by the glass. A guided tour with a local food expert transforms a browse into an education.
You'll learn to read Italian labels, understand why Florentine cuisine is so defiantly simple, and eat extremely well in the process. Book in advance - the best guides fill up fast.
4. Take a Pottery Class in a Florentine Artisan Studio
The Renaissance love affair with ceramic decoration - from the maiolica tiles of Luca della Robbia to the terracotta rooftops visible from every hilltop - is alive in small studios across the city. A two-hour pottery class is surprisingly affordable and requires no experience.
You'll leave with a hand-shaped piece to take home, posted to you after firing if you're flying carry-on only.
5. Cycle to Fiesole at Sunrise
The hilltop town of Fiesole sits just 8 kilometres northeast of Florence and offers a view of the city that no postcard quite captures. Rent a bike the evening before, set an early alarm, and make the climb before the heat of the day builds.
At sunrise, with the cypress trees and terracotta rooftops laid out below you and almost no one else around, Florence reveals itself as what it truly is: one of the most beautiful things human beings have ever made.
6. Attend a Sunset Aperitivo on a Rooftop Terrace
The Florentine ritual of aperitivo - a pre-dinner drink accompanied by a spread of small bites - is taken seriously here. Several rooftop bars and terraces across the city open for sunset aperitivo with views across the Duomo and the surrounding hills.
The Negroni was invented in Florence in 1919; drinking one here, watching the sun drop behind the Apennines, is not a tourist cliché - it is the correct thing to do.
7. Visit the Boboli Gardens Early in the Morning
The Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace are one of Europe's finest formal gardens - terraced, theatrical, and full of sculpture. Most visitors arrive mid-morning with the tour groups.
Come instead at opening time on a weekday and you'll have the cypress-lined allées almost entirely to yourself. Bring an espresso from the bar at the garden entrance and walk slowly. The city noise disappears within minutes.
8. Explore the Vasari Corridor
Commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici in 1564, the Vasari Corridor is a secret elevated passageway that runs 1 kilometre from the Palazzo Vecchio, across the Ponte Vecchio, and into the Pitti Palace, allowing the Medici to move through the city without walking among the people.
Access has been limited in recent years as restoration continues, but when open it offers a perspective on Florence that is genuinely breathtaking.
9. Book a Private Wine Tasting in a Florentine Enoteca
Tuscany produces some of Italy's most celebrated wines: Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Super Tuscans. A private guided tasting in one of Florence's historic enoteche is an hour well spent, especially before a day trip into the Chianti hills.
Look for sommeliers who pour regional wines alongside food pairings - pecorino, salumi, Tuscan flatbreads - rather than formal tastings without food.
10. Spend a Morning in the Oltrarno Antique Shops
The streets around Borgo Ognissanti and Via Maggio are lined with antique dealers, restorers, and curiosity shops. You won't find bargains, but you will find beautiful things: 18th-century botanical prints, painted wooden crucifixes, 1960s Florentine silverware, maps of Tuscany drawn when the ink was still wet.
Even if you buy nothing, an hour wandering these shops is a masterclass in Italian decorative history.
Plan Your Florence Experience
Florence rewards slowness. The visitors who come away changed are those who put down the guidebook for at least half a day and let the city find them in a workshop, on a hillside, at a bar, in a garden.
If you're looking for a Florence experience that engages your senses and sends you home with something genuinely unique, the Feel Toscana perfume workshop is a perfect place to
begin.
2 hours. Your own formula. Your own scent. Your name on the bottle.
Comments