Museo dell'Opera del Duomo

The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo is the storehouse and the explanation of the buildings standing outside its own door. The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the body that has looked after the cathedral complex for seven centuries, founded the museum in 1891 and rebuilt it from the ground up in 2015 into more than 6,000 square metres arranged as 28 rooms across three floors. Museum and monuments therefore share one owner, one ticket system and one square, which is why the pass that opens the Baptistery opens this building too. Its purpose is worth grasping before going in.

The Opera counts over 750 works of art covering 720 years and calls the collection the largest concentration of Florentine monumental sculpture in the world; about 225 of them are on display at a time. Four things account for most of why people come. Ghiberti's Gate of Paradise, the gilded east doors of the Baptistery, is here in the original, and so are his North Gate and Andrea Pisano's South Door, which puts all three sets of Baptistery doors in one room. Michelangelo's Pietà Bandini, an unfinished late work, stands free in its own space. Donatello's Mary Magdalene, carved in wood and deliberately gaunt, is nearby, along with his marble Saint John the Evangelist and his Beardless Prophet.

It is a fair one: 28 rooms over three floors at a pace that allows a real stop at six or seven works. The museum's own audio guide gives a second and more useful calibration. The free OperaGuide app publishes two routes, a Highlights route of 26 works timed at about one hour and a Complete route of over two hours covering all 225 works on display. One hour is therefore the honest floor for a visit that is not a walk-through, two hours and up is the whole building, and the Opera's 90 minutes sits deliberately between them. Choose by which of the three the day allows.

Daily 08:30–19:00. Closed for maintenance on the first Tuesday of every month. The monumental complex is also closed on 1 January, Easter Sunday and 25 December. Check the date before anything else. The Museum is closed to the public on the first Tuesday of every month for maintenance work, and the whole monumental complex closes on 25 December, 1 January and Easter Sunday. The first Tuesday is the one way to reach Piazza del Duomo 9 and find the door shut while everything else in the square is open, and it catches somebody every month.

There is no museum-only ticket. The lowest-priced standard adult option is the €15 Ghiberti Pass, which includes one admission each to the Museum, Baptistery and Santa Reparata over three calendar days. Giotto Pass costs €20 and Brunelleschi Pass €30. There is no museum-only ticket. Access runs through one of the Opera's three passes, and all three include the Museum: the Ghiberti Pass at 15 euro, the Giotto Pass at 20 euro and the Brunelleschi Pass at 30 euro. The reduced rate for ages 7 to 14 is 5, 7 and 12 euro respectively, and children aged 0 to 6 enter free.

The museum entrance is at Piazza del Duomo 9. Autolinee Toscane bus C2 serves ROMA DUOMO when travelling from Leopolda toward Piazza Beccaria and ORIUOLO DUOMO when travelling from Piazza Beccaria toward Leopolda. The entrance is at Piazza del Duomo 9, at the eastern end of the square behind the Cathedral's apse, and not at the façade end where most of the queue stands. It is a separate door from every other monument on the pass, so a visitor who assumes the Museum is somewhere inside the Cathedral will lose ten minutes learning otherwise. No car is needed, and one is a liability.

Ramps and elevators provide step-free access to all three museum floors and the panoramic terrace. Wheelchairs are available at the museum entrance. The TouchAble tactile route supports blind and partially sighted visitors. Certified guide and assistance animals are permitted. Visitors with disabilities may request free admission through the Accessibility Office or the ticket office at Piazza San Giovanni 7; companion eligibility is assessed according to assistance needs. The first Tuesday of the month is the trap that costs an entire visit, and it bears repeating because no other monument in the complex shares it.

Photography is permitted inside the monuments, this Museum included, but without flash, and tripods and selfie sticks are not allowed. In practice that removes long exposures from the options and puts everything on a handheld camera or a phone braced against a rail or a plinth edge. The building repays the effort more than most sculpture museums, because the 2015 rebuild set the works out for looking at rather than for storing. The Gates of Paradise sit behind glass, so the working problem there is reflection: shoot at an angle to the panel rather than square on, and bring the lens close to the glass to kill whatever is standing behind you.