Accademia Gallery Artworks, Room by Room

The Galleria dell'Accademia was founded in 1784, when Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo set it up as a teaching collection for students of the Accademia di Belle Arti, which still occupies the building next door. That origin explains the museum's character: not an encyclopaedic collection, but a set of very different sections — sculpture, gold-ground painting, nineteenth-century plaster casts, musical instruments — gathered under one roof on Via Ricasoli.

The good news is that a single ticket covers it all, in 1–2 hours. This table sums up the route; each section is described in turn below.

The first room on the route takes its name from the giant group at its centre: Giambologna's full-size plaster model for the Rape of the Sabine Women, the preparatory cast for the marble that stands under the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria. Seeing the model before (or after) the original in the square is a free little lesson in how a sculpture came into being: here you can circle the spiralling composition at your leisure, with no traffic.

The walls are an anthology of fifteenth-century Florentine painting: altarpieces by Botticelli, Perugino and Filippino Lippi. It is the room most visitors cross in two minutes on their way to the David: give it ten, on the way in or on the way out.

The Tribuna was designed by the architect Emilio De Fabris specifically for the David, which arrived from Piazza della Signoria in 1873; the room opened to the public in 1882. Under the skylight, the 5.17 metres of Carrara marble carved between 1501 and 1504 remain the one true reason this museum has a queue: walk the full circle around the statue, study both profiles, and don't settle for the frontal photo. The statue in the piazza, there since 1910, is a copy; the original is only here.

The rooms of fourteenth-century painting hold what is, by some counts, the world's largest collection of gold-ground panels ("fondi oro"): paintings on gilded backgrounds, ranging from the school of Giotto to the late Gothic of Lorenzo Monaco. The gold is not decoration but language: it stands for divine light, outside time and space.

The piece to seek out is Pacino di Bonaguida's Tree of Life: a painted tree whose branches carry dozens of small medallions telling the stories of Christ, to be read from bottom to top like a theological comic strip. It alone justifies the ten minutes almost nobody gives these rooms.

The fifteenth-century rooms tell the story of the Florence of merchants and weddings. The star is Lo Scheggia's Cassone Adimari: a wedding-chest panel showing a procession of ladies and gentlemen in dazzling brocades in front of the Baptistery. It is the most vivid record of how the city dressed — and celebrated — in the early Renaissance, and the detail in the fabrics deserves a magnifying glass.

Around it hang more works by Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, reaching as far as Bronzino: a quick but high-quality survey of Florentine painting between the 1400s and 1500s — useful as an appetiser (or a recap) for the Uffizi.

The final section surprises anyone who isn't expecting it: around 50 instruments from the Medici and Lorraine collections, the legacy of court collecting. The headline pieces are a cello and a viola by Antonio Stradivari that belonged to the so-called "Medici quintet", brought to Florence for the grand-ducal court and preserved in extraordinary condition.

Alongside them are instruments by Bartolomeo Cristofori, the court harpsichord maker who invented the piano here in Florence: you can see up close the technical leap from the harpsichord to the "gravicembalo col piano e forte". Ten minutes well spent, especially if you travel with someone who plays.

Everything you have just read is covered by one single ticket: €20 full price, €2 reduced for EU citizens aged 18–25, plus €4 for official online booking; resellers such as Tiqets start at about €31, with prices varying by date. The full picture, including the combinations with the Bargello, is on the ticket prices page; in high season a timed skip-the-line entry is worth it either way.