Basilica of Santa Maria Novella: tickets, prices, opening hours and what to see

Santa Maria Novella church tickets cost €7.50 at the ticket office on Piazza della Stazione 5 according to smn.it; on the platforms prices start at €14.50 with an audio guide at the time of checking, and the doors are open 9:00–17:30 Monday to Thursday. This is the first great church you see when you walk out of the station, and it is also the one most often visited in a hurry: inside are Masaccio’s Trinity, Giotto’s Crucifix and a whole convent of frescoed cloisters that almost nobody walks to the end of.

Santa Maria Novella church tickets: what you pay for

The ticket is not for the basilica alone: it covers the museum complex, church plus convent. That is why €7.50 is still one of the best prices in the city centre.

On the official site, buying online adds a €1 booking fee: that is the difference between €7.50 and €8.50, and nothing more. The higher platform price includes the audio guide and cancellation under the product’s own terms: at Santa Maria Novella, where there is effectively no queue, that is a convenience purchase, not time saved.

Who gets in free

Besides children under 11 and residents of the Comune di Firenze, entry is free for people with disabilities and one companion, members of the clergy, licensed Italian tour guides, ICOM members and journalists. Groups are the exception: from six participants up, headsets are compulsory — and must be sorted out before entering the complex — and a group cannot exceed 25 people plus one guide, as the Opera’s published rules state.

Santa Maria Novella opening hours, day by day: mind Friday and Sunday

Santa Maria Novella has the most irregular hours of Florence’s great churches, because the complex is first and foremost a place of worship. Two lines in your notes will save you a wasted trip.

The Sunday timetable also applies on 1 and 6 January, 15 August, 1 November, 8 December, 25 December and Easter. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday the basilica is closed to visitors: you may only come in for services.

Early closures for services are published in the notices on the official site, sometimes only a few days ahead: on 4 October 2026 closing is brought forward to 16:15, and on 15 October 2026 to 14:30. If you only have one afternoon, check that page the same morning.

How to book and how long you’ll wait

The answer here is short: booking is not compulsory, and on most days of the year you buy a ticket at the desk and walk in. The visitor entrance and the ticket office are on Piazza della Stazione 5, not on the facade: anyone queuing in front of the church on Piazza Santa Maria Novella is waiting at the wrong door.

Buying ahead — on the official site for +€1, or through a platform — makes sense in three cases: if you want the audio guide ready on your phone, if you are planning the day to the minute before you travel, or if you arrive by train and want to walk in without dragging your bags past the ticket desk.

What to see: a 90-minute route

Leon Battista Alberti’s facade

Start outside. The lower part, banded in white and green, is medieval; the upper part, with the pediment, the doorway and the two great side scrolls, is the design of Leon Battista Alberti, commissioned by the Rucellai family. Those scrolls solve the problem of joining a tall nave to two low aisles: half of Europe copied them for three centuries.

Masaccio’s Trinity

It is on the left wall of the nave and goes unnoticed by anyone walking straight towards the altar. It is the first fresco built on rigorous geometric perspective: the painted chapel looks carved into the wall, and the skeleton below, with its inscription, reminds visitors how everyone’s story ends. Stand in front of it for five minutes, then walk back to the end of the nave: the vanishing point is calculated for the eye level of someone standing right there.

Giotto’s Crucifix and the great chapels

Giotto’s Crucifix, painted on panel, hangs in the central nave. In the Tornabuoni Chapel, behind the high altar, are Domenico Ghirlandaio’s frescoes with the Stories of the Virgin and the Baptist: a group portrait of the Florence of the day, with ladies, merchants and patrons placed inside the sacred scenes as if they had been present. The Gondi Chapel holds Brunelleschi’s wooden Crucifix; the Strozzi Chapel, at the end of the left transept, a fourteenth-century cycle by Nardo di Cione and an altarpiece by Andrea Orcagna.

The cloisters and the Spanish Chapel

From the Green Cloister — named after the green earth pigment used in Paolo Uccello’s frescoes of the Book of Genesis — you enter the Spanish Chapel, the old chapter house: walls and vault frescoed from end to end, with the Dominican cycle fanning out above your head. It is the room most visitors never see, and it is the best part of the ticket. The Cloister of the Dead, the Ubriachi Chapel, the Refectory and the Great Cloister with the Dormitory complete the route.

The Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica is not the museum

This is the most common mix-up in the neighbourhood. The Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, at Via della Scala 16, is a historic shop that grew out of the Dominican friars’ apothecary: entry is free, you wander through frescoed halls and past wooden counters, and you can buy perfume or rose water. It is not run by the Opera, it is not covered by the museum complex ticket, and you cannot reach it from inside the basilica: it has its own entrance, its own hours and its own rules, published on the Officina’s site and not on the complex’s.

In plain terms: two addresses, two visits, no shared ticket. Do them one after the other, because they are barely two hundred metres apart.

Getting there, luggage and the area

Firenze Santa Maria Novella station is literally opposite the museum entrance: two hundred metres, under three minutes on foot. That is why this is the visit to slot into your first or last day, when the hotel room is not ready yet or has already been taken back.

The station’s official left luggage is inside, along platform 16, open daily 7:00–21:00 with prices from €6: the details and the private alternatives are on the luggage storage page, and train times for Rome, Bologna and Pisa are on the page about trains from Florence.

Nearby

• The Duomo and Brunelleschi’s Dome, ten minutes away on foot along Via dei Banchi.
• Palazzo Strozzi, eight minutes away: the city’s big temporary exhibitions.
• Medici Chapels and San Lorenzo, five minutes north.
• Santa Croce, the other great ticketed basilica, on the opposite side of the centre.
• Florence’s other museums: Museo Novecento, on the same square, and the city’s second tier of collections.

The bottom line

Santa Maria Novella tickets are still the best value among Florence’s major monuments: €7.50 official for a basilica, three cloisters and a chapter house frescoed from floor to vault, with no compulsory booking and no queues. Just remember two times: Friday opens at 11, Sunday at 13. And if you live in Florence, do not pay — your ID is enough.