Exhibitions in Tuscany: finding your way
Search for "exhibitions in Tuscany" and you will usually find a list of dates that goes out of date within a month. It makes more sense to work the other way round: the major exhibitions are almost always held in the same places, and each one has its own character, fairly stable prices and a particular way of selling tickets.
- Palazzo Strozzi (Florence) is the most important venue: exhibitions of international standing, often organised with major museums abroad.
- Palazzo Blu (Pisa) focuses on names that are very well known to the general public, especially in autumn and winter.
- Santa Maria della Scala (Siena) puts on a rotating series of smaller exhibitions inside a museum complex that is worth visiting in its own right.
What to book, in short. This season the two exhibitions that justify a trip are Broken at Palazzo Strozzi and Hopper at Palazzo Blu. For both, the official fixed-date ticket is the cheapest option. In Siena you can usually walk in without booking.
Palazzo Strozzi: the heart of Florence exhibitions
This Renaissance palazzo, a stone's throw from Via Tornabuoni, hosts the most ambitious temporary exhibitions in the region. The previous one, devoted to Rothko, drew more than 290,000 visitors, which gives you an idea of the queues you may meet at weekends.
On this season: "Broken. Il potere del frammento"
From 25 September Palazzo Strozzi presents "Broken. Il potere del frammento" (the power of the fragment), and the title is worth reading carefully: this is not an exhibition about a single artist. It is a themed journey through the fragment in sculpture, from ancient Egypt to Giovanni Pisano and Michelangelo, and on to Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Huma Bhabha, Francesco Vezzoli and Danh Vo. In the courtyard there is a new installation by Mark Manders.
There are more than 80 works, with loans from the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. One section looks at the fragments left behind by iconoclasm, by war and by the Florence flood of 1966. The exhibition is organised with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it will travel after Florence. The closing date is announced for late January; confirm it on the palazzo's website.
Opening hours: every day 10:00–20:00, on Thursdays until 23:00.
Palazzo Strozzi tickets
| Ticket | Price | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Full price, fixed date | €15 | everyone |
| Full price, open date | €20 | skip the line, any day |
| Reduced | €12 | under-30s, members of ACI, FAI, TCI, Coop and others; anyone arriving in Florence on a Trenitalia train |
| Youth | €5 | ages 6 to 18; on Thursdays from 18:00 also under-30s and students in Tuscany |
| Family | €25 | 1–2 adults and at least one young person aged 6–18, up to 6 people |
| Audio guide | €4 | Italian and English, about 1 h |
The reduced ticket for train travellers is little known: it is valid with a Frecce or Trenitalia ticket to Florence for the same day, or with a CartaFreccia card within five days. Changing the date costs €2. The lockers are free.
Palazzo Blu, Pisa
On the Lungarno Gambacorti, Palazzo Blu is Tuscany's other venue for major exhibitions. On its upper floor there is a permanent collection of Pisan art from the fourteenth century onwards, which you can also visit outside the big exhibitions.
On this season: Edward Hopper
"Edward Hopper: New York e oltre" (New York and beyond) is scheduled from mid-October to early March, with more than 150 works from the Whitney Museum in New York. In autumn the palazzo also hosts two smaller illustration exhibitions: "Piero Macola. Paesaggi di vita" (landscapes of life), until early November, and "Yellow&Blue", devoted to Ukrainian illustrators, throughout October.
If you come across articles online about a "Belle Époque" exhibition at Palazzo Blu, they refer to a previous season.
Palazzo Blu tickets
| Ticket | Price |
|---|---|
| Full price | €16 |
| Reduced (ages 17–27, over-70s and others) | €14 |
| University students, on Thursdays | €10 |
| Ages 6 to 16 | €7 |
| Open ticket | €18 |
| Under 6 | free |
From Monday to Friday it is open from 10:00 to 19:00, with last entry an hour before closing. Check the weekend opening hours on the website.
Combining Palazzo Blu with the Piazza dei Miracoli on the same day is easy: see the page on Pisa.
Santa Maria della Scala, Siena
The former hospital opposite the Duomo is now a large museum complex, with fresco cycles and, inside it, the National Archaeological Museum. Temporary exhibitions are usually included in the museum ticket, which costs €9 full price (€8 if booked) and €7 reduced, or €20 for families. On the first Sunday of every month entry is free, including the Archaeological Museum.
Opening hours follow two schedules. From mid-March to the end of October it is open every day from 10:00 to 19:00. From November to mid-March it opens on Mondays and from Wednesday to Friday from 10:00 to 17:00, at weekends and on public holidays from 10:00 to 19:00, and it is closed on Tuesdays; over the Christmas holidays it goes back to opening every day. It is closed on 25 December.
The exhibition programme changes several times a year and the next one is announced at fairly short notice: check the museum's home page. For the rest of the city, see the page on Siena.
Lucca
Lucca has no major exhibition venue comparable to Strozzi or Palazzo Blu: if you read about an exhibition in the city, check on the organiser's website that it is really on before planning your trip, because pages that have not been updated for years still circulate online.
In autumn the biggest event is Lucca Comics & Games, usually held between late October and early November, which fills the city: check the dates on the official website and book your accommodation well in advance. Palazzo Ducale sometimes hosts exhibitions too: check its calendar. For the rest of the city, see Lucca.
Official ticket or Tiqets?
For exhibitions the rule is simple: the official website is cheaper. Tiqets sells entry to Broken from €21, against €15 for the fixed-date ticket and €20 for the open-date ticket on Palazzo Strozzi's website, and that ticket is non-refundable. It only makes sense if you prefer to keep all the tickets for your trip in a single app. Tiqets also sells entry to the Textile Museum in Prato, from €10: before you go, check the opening hours and exhibitions on the museum's website.
Palazzo Strozzi: Broken - The Power of the Fragment Exhibition
(1,798 reviews) from €21
Book on Tiqets
Partner prices change and we check them regularly; the official prices are those published by each venue.
All Florence tickets on Tiqets
How to check what is on
Exhibitions change every few months, and the dates you find on blogs or in old articles often belong to a past season. Before you travel:
- Open the venue's own website, not an aggregator. Palazzo Strozzi, Palazzo Blu and Santa Maria della Scala put the current exhibition on their home page and, once it has been announced, the next one too.
- Check the closing date on the exhibition page. Extensions do happen, and the last few weeks of a headline exhibition are often the most crowded.
- Look at the opening hours for your exact day. Late openings, such as Thursdays at Palazzo Strozzi, and Palazzo Blu's weekend hours change from one exhibition to the next.
- Look for free days. At Santa Maria della Scala it is the first Sunday of the month.
- For smaller exhibitions, search the town council's website. Exhibitions in council-run palazzi and libraries often appear only there, sometimes with just a few weeks' notice.
Mistakes to avoid
- Assuming that "Broken" is a single-artist exhibition. It is a themed exhibition: Michelangelo is there, but alongside dozens of other artists, from ancient Egypt to the present day.
- Buying the open-date ticket when you already know when you will go. At Strozzi it costs €5 more.
- Forgetting your train ticket. At Palazzo Strozzi it gets you a reduced ticket.
- Going to Siena on a Tuesday in the low season. Santa Maria della Scala is closed.
- Trusting dates from a past season. That goes for Palazzo Blu as much as for Lucca.
Related pages
Exhibitions make a good plan for a rainy day in town; with children, though, the caves, parks and aquarium work better. For the great permanent museums see Florence, and to build a wider itinerary start from the things to do in Tuscany.