Florentia – Florence

Is it worth the trip?

Not on its own. Nobody should go to Florence for Florentia: the Roman town is a layer under a Renaissance city, and most of it is either built over or in a museum. If you are in Florence anyway, it turns a walk you would take regardless into a reading of the street plan. The curve of the amphitheatre is a short detour from Santa Croce and costs nothing, and Piazza della Repubblica is where the forum was. The theatre excavations are the real prize, and the one thing worth planning around, but only if they are running when you visit.

Getting there

Everything is in the historic centre and on foot. Firenze Santa Maria Novella, the main railway station, is about 500 m north-west of Piazza del Duomo (en.wikipedia). The theatre is under Palazzo Vecchio on Piazza della Signoria, and the amphitheatre streets and Piazza della Repubblica are each about 300 m away (measured between the sites’ mapped points). The National Archaeological Museum is at piazza Santissima Annunziata 9b (the Ministry of Culture).

The theatre excavations are seen only on a guided visit. After a long closure they reopened on 13 December 2025 (the city’s tourism site), with visits on Saturdays and Sundays at 12.00 and 12.45 for up to 15 people and a €5 ticket, starting from the Palazzo Vecchio ticket office and booked through Fondazione MUS.E. Since 16 October 2026 those visits have been temporarily suspended, with no date given for their return (the Musei Civici Fiorentini, read 24 October 2026). Check the Palazzo Vecchio museum page before you plan around them. The Palazzo Vecchio museum itself is open 09.00–19.00, except on Thursdays, when it closes at 14.00, and ticket sales end an hour before closing. A ticket is €18 plus €1 for booking online, €12 for 18–25-year-olds and university students, and free under 18 (the Musei Civici Fiorentini). The palace is also the city hall, and the museum closes wholly or in part on some days for official events, which its page lists month by month.

The National Archaeological Museum opens 08.30–19.00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 08.30–14.00 on the other weekdays, Saturdays, the first Sunday of the month and public holidays. It is closed on the other Sundays. A ticket is €8, reduced €2 (the Ministry of Culture’s page, as of May 2026).

The amphitheatre

No ruin of the amphitheatre stands. As the medieval houses went up on its outer walls and on the wedges of its seating they closed most of its arches, and the palazzi along the curve stand on its foundations (it.wikipedia). Piazza dei Peruzzi, via dei Bentaccordi and via Torta, the “crooked street”, bend together into an incomplete ellipse; two more streets, via dell’Anguillara and Borgo dei Greci, cut across the old arena, and the rest of the inside is built over (fr.wikipedia). On Piazza dei Peruzzi the evenly spaced arched openings have been suggested to follow the arena’s old entrances, a hypothesis rather than a finding (it.wikipedia). Remains are said to be visible in via dei Bentaccordi (en.wikipedia), but no published description says which stones are Roman, and vici.org classes the amphitheatre as invisible. Walk the curve from Piazza dei Peruzzi round to via Torta: it is free, has no timetable, and lies about 200 m east of the theatre under Palazzo Vecchio (measured between the two mapped points). The nearest bus stops, both named Verdi, are about 140 m away (OpenStreetMap).

It was built between 124 and 130 (Pleiades; it.wikipedia), well outside the walls, and marked the furthest the Roman town reached to the east (it.wikipedia). Published figures for its size differ: the long axis is given as 113 to 126 m, the short axis as 89 m, and the arena floor as 64 by 40 m; the capacity is put at 15,000 to 20,000 spectators, a middle-sized arena beside the Colosseum’s 87,000 (it.wikipedia). Its outer wall rose three storeys in local stone faced with marble, two of them arcades one above the other and the top one a solid wall with small windows. Its capacity and its masonry of coursed pietraforte are what date it to Hadrian, and a size beyond what the town alone needed has suggested it also served the people of the outskirts and of Fiesole. How the inside was laid out is partly conjecture, and where the main entrances lay is not known (it.wikipedia).

It probably went out of use by the second half of the 4th century, and from the end of that century it was partly dismantled for its materials, often reused in religious buildings (it.wikipedia). The name outlived the building: it is recorded from 1013 as Perilasio, Perilascio, Parlascio and Parlagio, from a Greek word for a circular space (it.wikipedia), and nearby via del Parlagio was called via del Parlascio until 2012 (fr.wikipedia). As the medieval city grew it was taken inside the new walls, the Peruzzi built their palace on it, and medieval chroniclers say it served as a prison (it.wikipedia). In the late 19th century the rebuilding of the centre planned a broad avenue from Piazza della Signoria to Piazza Santa Croce through the quarter; it was never built (it.wikipedia).

It has never been systematically excavated (it.wikipedia). The first detailed study was published by the scholar Domenico Maria Manni in 1746. Remains that had come to light in the 16th century were uncovered again and surveyed by Desiderio Fraschetti in 1886 (it.wikipedia), and a small part emerged in 1887 during work on a sewer in Borgo dei Greci (it.wikipedia). A test trench dug in Borgo dei Greci, inside the arena, in 2014 found no Roman levels even at almost 4 m below the street (it.wikipedia). The scale model photographed on this page, with the amphitheatre in front, was shown in the Museo di Firenze com’era, which closed in October 2010 (fr.wikipedia), so it cannot be seen there.

History

Florentia was founded as a Roman colony beside the Arno, in Regio VII Etruria, on a site where a small Etruscan settlement had grown up from the 8th century BC (it.wikipedia). Its date has long been argued over. The decision to found the colony is linked either to a law of 59 BC or to the years after Caesar’s death, and the excavated town plan dates from between 30 and 15 BC. The older attribution to Sulla has been rejected (it.wikipedia). It was laid out as a grid with the forum where its two main streets crossed, next to the bridge where the road crossed the river, and walled in brick with round towers (it.wikipedia). In AD 15, the historian Tacitus records, a delegation from Florentia went to the Senate in Rome to oppose a plan to divert the Chiana into the Arno, and the plan was dropped (it.wikipedia).

The town reached its peak under Hadrian. The aqueduct, the amphitheatre and the large baths were built, the forum was enlarged and repaved in marble, and the theatre’s seating, until then largely of timber, was built in masonry (it.wikipedia). Published capacities for the theatre run from 8,000 to 15,000 spectators (it.wikipedia, en.wikipedia). From the end of the 3rd century Florentia was probably the seat of the governor of Tuscia et Umbria; a statue dedicated to Diocletian in 287 was found near Por Santa Maria in 1873 (it.wikipedia).

Christianity reshaped the town early. The first known bishop of Florence, Felix, is recorded in 313, and in 394 Ambrose of Milan consecrated the basilica of San Lorenzo just outside the north gate. From the end of the 4th century the public buildings were abandoned and stripped. The town came through the Ostrogothic period and the Gothic war, but by the Lombard age its Roman layout had dissolved (it.wikipedia). The theatre became a fortified strongpoint, remembered in the Middle Ages as the Guardingo (it.wikipedia).