Top places to stay in Florence, Italy.
Florence offers accommodations that range from grand Renaissance palaces and elegant boutique hotels to refined riverside residences and hillside retreats, placing visitors within easy reach of world-renowned museums, historic piazzas, celebrated trattorias, and one of Europe's most remarkable collections of art and architecture. Each neighborhood reveals a different perspective on the Tuscan capital, where centuries of history, craftsmanship, and everyday Florentine life unfold within a remarkably walkable historic center.
The Centro Storico remains Florence's defining hospitality district, where the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Piazza della Signoria, the Uffizi Galleries, and the Ponte Vecchio place visitors at the heart of the city's artistic and architectural legacy. Landmark accommodations including Hotel Savoy, Florence, The St. Regis Florence, Hotel Brunelleschi, Portrait Firenze, and Helvetia & Bristol Firenze surround guests with Renaissance landmarks, luxury boutiques, and historic cafés, while neighboring Santa Maria Novella combines grand piazzas, convenient rail connections, and elegant hotels including The Place Firenze, Hotel L'Orologio Firenze, and 25hours Hotel Florence Piazza San Paolino. Beyond the historic center, Oltrarno reveals another side of Florence through artisan workshops, neighborhood trattorias, quiet piazzas, and boutique properties woven between centuries-old streets south of the Arno River.
As Florence extends beyond its Renaissance core, the hills surrounding Piazzale Michelangelo and Fiesole combine panoramic city views, historic villas, and refined countryside retreats, while San Niccolò blends riverside charm, independent galleries, wine bars, and intimate boutique accommodations just beyond the busiest visitor areas. Across the city, restored palaces, luxury heritage hotels, and elegant boutique stays provide distinctive perspectives on one of Italy's most celebrated destinations. Between Renaissance residences, internationally acclaimed luxury hotels, and intimate Florentine retreats, Florence offers accommodations that complement every style of travel while showcasing the timeless beauty and enduring character of the birthplace of the Renaissance. Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
Foresyte Travel's top five choices.
5. Il Salviatino Firenze
Il Salviatino Firenze occupies a villa on the slopes of Fiesole whose architectural history extends through medieval foundations and a major Renaissance transformation associated with Florence's patrician culture. The property acquired its defining early-twentieth-century character under Ugo Ojetti, the influential Italian art critic, journalist and writer who purchased the estate in 1911 and made it a gathering place for artists, intellectuals and political figures. Ojetti commissioned architect Ugo Giovannozzi to reshape the villa, integrating historic stonework, frescoes, grand staircases and landscaped grounds into a residence conceived around his extensive engagement with Italian art. Its later conversion into a hotel preserved that relationship between architecture and cultural patronage, giving Il Salviatino significance as a former intellectual salon overlooking the city that supplied much of Ojetti's scholarly subject matter.
4. The St. Regis Florence
The St. Regis Florence occupies the former Palazzo Giuntini on Piazza Ognissanti, where the building's architectural history developed along one of the Arno's most distinguished stretches of Renaissance and later aristocratic construction. The palace became the Grand Hotel during the nineteenth century and entered the generation of European grand hotels created as Florence expanded its international cultural and social importance. Historic interiors preserve frescoes, stucco decoration, chandeliers and richly ornamented salons beneath a façade facing the river and the church of Ognissanti. Its later transformation into The St. Regis Florence connected that Florentine grand-hotel inheritance with the hospitality tradition originating at John Jacob Astor IV's 1904 St. Regis New York, carrying two distinct luxury-hotel lineages into a single Arno-side property.
3. Portrait Firenze
Portrait Firenze emerged from the Ferragamo family's transformation of hospitality into a second major expression of the design culture established by Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence during the twentieth century. Lungarno Collection developed the property beside Ponte Vecchio, placing it within the compact section of the historic center where Ferragamo built his fashion house around Palazzo Spini Feroni after acquiring the medieval palace in 1938. Architect Michele Bönan shaped Portrait Firenze around a residential interpretation of postwar Italian design, using custom furnishings, photography and interiors that evoke Florence during the period when fashion, cinema and international society converged in the city. The hotel extends the Ferragamo family's relationship with Florence beyond footwear and fashion into an architectural hospitality project embedded within the same urban territory that shaped the company's international rise.
2. Rocco Forte Hotel Savoy
Rocco Forte Hotel Savoy occupies Piazza della Repubblica, the grand square created when Florence demolished much of its medieval Mercato Vecchio district during the city's late-nineteenth-century redevelopment after its period as capital of unified Italy. The hotel opened in 1893 amid that transformation, placing it directly within the new civic center created through widened streets, grand façades and the triumphal arch dedicated to King Victor Emmanuel II. Rocco Forte Hotels acquired the property during the company's formative expansion and commissioned Olga Polizzi to reshape its interiors, later bringing Laudomia Pucci into a major redesign that incorporated patterns and decorative references associated with the Florentine fashion house Emilio Pucci. The property connects Florence's post-unification urban reconstruction with two families that became major international representatives of Italian hospitality and fashion.
1. Four Seasons Hotel Firenze
Four Seasons Hotel Firenze centers on Palazzo della Gherardesca, a fifteenth-century residence commissioned by Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of the Florentine Republic under Lorenzo de' Medici, and designed in part by Giuliano da Sangallo. Successive owners expanded the palace and its artistic program across centuries, leaving Renaissance loggias, reliefs, frescoes and later decorative interventions embedded throughout the complex. The adjoining Giardino della Gherardesca evolved from Renaissance agricultural grounds into an extensive landscaped garden, with nineteenth-century alterations introducing the romantic planting and architectural features that shaped its later form. Four Seasons restored the palace, garden and neighboring former convent before opening the hotel in 2008, bringing a property tied directly to Medicean political culture, Renaissance architecture and centuries of Florentine garden history into a unified hospitality complex.
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