City guide · Italy

🇮🇹Florence

Florence holds 361,625 residents and the visitor numbers of a far larger place, and that compression is the whole experience. The Roman colony of 59 BC was laid out like an army camp, and its right angles still govern a historic centre that has been a UNESCO site since 1982 and can be walked across without hurrying. The Arno splits it, the Uffizi on the north bank and Palazzo Pitti on the south, a few minutes apart over the bridges. Standard Italian is the Florentine dialect, carried out of these same few streets by the writers who lived in them. Rome is 275 km to the southeast.