Galleria degli Uffizi

Florence is home to the greatest collection of Renaissance painting in the world, housed in the ex-offices (uffizi) of Cosimo de’ Medici’s court, a building which was designed by Vasari in the mid 1500s. Art buffs may well want to spend a whole day here, but you can get away with three hours to see the "un-missables". Ideally, I would advise doing it all in two separate visits.

Rooms roughly follow a chronological order. Highlights include the three glowing, Byzantine 'Maestà' alterpieces by Giotto, Cimabue and Duccio dating from the 13th and early 14th centuries in Room 2, Piero della Francesca's famous portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in Room 7 and a collection of romantic Fra Lippis in Room 8. The gallery’s most famous paintings, the Botticellis, are in Rooms 10-14; here the crowds throng around such masterpieces as 'The Adoration of the Magi' (1476), 'La Primavera' (1478), and 'The Birth of Venus'.

You could quite happily go home at this point, but if you did, you would miss Leonardo’s 'Adoration of the Magi', Caravaggio’s 'Bacchus' and 'Head of Medusa', Rosso Fiorentino’s famous 'Angel Musician', several superb Raphael’s and Titian’s 'Venus of Urbino'.