Michelangelo's David in the original at the Accademia gallery, as also its marble replica on the Piazza della Signoria, looks down on gawping tourists looking back up at it, but here in bronze on the Piazzale Michelangelo it has something better to survey:

Florence, where as early as the 13^th century decrees were promulgated that new streets must be pulchrae, amplae, et rectae: beautiful, broad, and straight  ̶  and with some effect, as a glance at the street maps in your guide book will tell you.

Essayist, memoirist and novelist Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence (a nod to Ruskin) is a mid-1950s masterwork on the history, art and architecture of this cultural capital of the Renaissance, and apart from personal acquaintance this article relies on it.

Goethe, in his celebrated 600-page Italienische Reise account of his 1786 tour of Italy devoted scarcely half a page to his fleeting visit to Florence, and professes himself not inclined to linger there; he would seem to have made his way on south to Arezzo the same day. The civic order and the evident wealth that built Florence persuades Goethe that the city must has enjoyed a long succession of good governments. Mary McCarthy wryly comments: "The evidence of wise rule that Goethe thought he perceived was the wise ruling of space  ̶  the only kind of government the Florentines ever mastered but one that was passed on to later generations." As McCarthy notes, according to Dante and Villani, Florence in the Middle Ages enjoyed only ten years of civil peace, under the Primo Popolo commune government between 1250 and 1260.

Well, to high art and culture then!

In the church of Santa Felicita, just at one end of the Ponte Vecchio and containing a private gallery of the later Medici ducal family, is Pontormo's Deposizione; freely on view, without charge, and a splendid example of Mannerist painting by the foremost exponent of that art. You will find whole salons of it at the Uffizi, at some outlay in expense and considerably more in sheer walking stamina, but here in one great gilded frame is all of the iridescent drapery and extravagant gestures that one might wish for. For a down-to-earth treatise on what Mannerism was all about (there is an awful lot of it in Florence) pages 209-219 of The Stones of Florence offer an earthy and entertaining account.

As for sculpture, the Bargello museum in downtown Florence houses the best of non-ecclesiastical sculpture in Florence, not overlooking the outstanding exterior statuary of the church of Orsanmichele just a block or so to the East. As Mary McCarthy says: the Uffizi is only a picture gallery, while the Bargello and the Museum of the Works of the Duomo are Florence. 

For junior visitors, and for seniors who have not lost a sense of childhood wonder, there are two Leonardo da Vinci museums in downtown Florence, each boasting an impressive array of wooden models from Leonardo's famed engineering and aeronautical drawings. If these seem far-fetched, the suspicion is that Leonardo was not seriously concerned with their realization, but rather was trying to impress his patron and employer, Ludovico Sforza, then duke of Milan, with his capabilities as a military engineer.

For the more serious student, there is the History of Science Museum, hard by the Uffizi, which contains a collection of Galileo's instruments. And, for those who are really keen, a short inner-city bus ride north is the National Archaeological Museum, which has an extensive collection of artworks of that much overlooked people, the Etruscans, as well as an impressive Egyptian section, complete with mummies and a temple colonnade.

For a convenient solution, however, the Bardini Museum, just across the Arno, is a sort of mini Uffizi plus Duomo Museum and Bargello, all in one. It boasts one other exhibit, a boar, the rubbing of whose snout is supposed to guarantee that the visitor will return to Florence. It is evident that few have resisted the temptation:

Florence in February

more affordable, but the weather can be as raw as the Irish Spring. October is the best tip: the high summer crowds are gone and there is still warmth in the air. 

You may pass up the stuffy staterooms of the Pitti Palace and the bathos of Napoleon's marble bath within. Follow your own fancy and stroll and look around. Here to finish is something that caught the writer's eye from the hotel roof and, struck by its pleasing profile, prompted this sketch: