Published on Sep, 2024
When they say your guide will meet you in front of the main door of the Cathadrel, it’s literally in the square in front of the entrance. It was windy and rainy the day of this tour. We showed up 20 minutes early to be sure we found the spot and also not to be late for our tour. With the square packed full of people it was hard for us to identify a tour guide. At our exact tour time, I left the area we found shelter in from the rain to see if I could locate our tour guide. It helps in the app if you put a picture of yourself. Our tour guide recognized me and I was able to call my hubby to come meet us from our shelter place.
At first we didn’t understand why we didn’t get in the skip the line for touring the Cathedral and instead our tour guide explained about the history of the Cathedral. When done, she asked if we would prefer a tour of the museum as all the art from the Cathedral was in the museum. We said yes, well me with kind of I’m not so sure about this tour.
Let me tell you that the tour was the highlight of our tours in Florence. Our tour guide was spot on for what to see. The art work and sculptures here were impressive. Our time guide was extremely knowledgeable and we enjoyed our tour with her.
We had a scheduled skip the line Dome climb of 1:30pm. With an early breakfast and end of tour at Mūsēum at 12:30pm, we opted to end out tour early to grab lunch before climb. In hindsight, I wish I would have known our climb was 1:30 so we could have eaten a later breakfast or brought a snack with us to go hold us over.
Our tour guide did give us a great recommendation for lunch option and we chose Mister Pizza. This was the best pizza we ate in our stay in Italy.
It does state that the climb will be strenuous and that you should be in good health to be able to climb steep stairs in tight spaces and 463 stairs. I got to the last 63 stairs before the dome and wasn’t winded but could tell you that most people were and stopped once or twice to take a quick break. You gotta keep moving so your break is a few minutes. I chose to stop because the spiral staircase made me dizzy, yet you have to wait for the rest of your group to make it to this point before you can climb back down and yes the same set of stairs you went up. In hindsight I wished I would have pushed thru as my husband who was way behind me on the climb made it to the top and the rest of the stairs though steep with low ceilings wouldn’t have been worse for me then spiral staircases. Since I still had to go back down them, I’d say push though to make it to the top. I do have a fear of heights and just a little claustrophobic. The climb was hard for me because of that. If you are very claustrophobic, I’d say this would be extremely difficult to do.
I rated this tour as a 5 because what the ticket/tour included, and specifically the guided tour of the museum, along with the skip the line Dome tour, and access to the cathedral (which we saw on our own after the tour and yes all the art is in the museum not the church, baptistery, bell tower and other monuments. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and very passionate and it showed.
