Palazzo Pitti & Boboli Gardens

The Pitti is the other half of Medici Florence, across the Arno in the Oltrarno, and it corrects the Uffizi's one distortion: there the art is curated; here it's displayed the way princes actually lived with it. The Palatine Gallery upstairs keeps the old hang — paintings stacked three and four high on damask walls under frescoed ceilings, Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola at elbow height beside Titians and Rubens, arranged for decoration rather than chronology. It holds more Raphaels in its rooms than most countries and gets a tenth of the Uffizi's crowd, which after a Florentine morning of queues feels like being let in on something.

The palace stacks further collections for the interested — the Royal Apartments' silk-and-gilt state rooms, the treasury's Medici hardstone extravagances, a costume museum — but the second act everyone should take is out the back door: the Boboli Gardens, the Medici's hillside of cypress avenues, grottoes and amphitheatres that became the template for every royal garden in Europe, Versailles included. Climb the axis behind the palace to the Neptune fountain and keep going: the top terraces by the porcelain museum deliver the best under-photographed view in Florence — the whole city model-sized below, Duomo dead centre, and vineyard hills where postcards claim only buildings exist.

Buontalenti's Grotto, the mannerist cave-folly dripping with sculpted stalactites (open on a schedule; check on entry), and the pond island of the Isolotto with its Ocean fountain are the garden's two set pieces; the rest is atmosphere best consumed slowly, ideally with supermarket cherries. Real shoes — the gravel climbs are honest hills.

The palace + gardens pass is the sensible ticket. Do it as the Oltrarno day: Pitti and Boboli until mid-afternoon, then the neighbourhood's workshops and aperitivo squares (Santo Spirito, ten minutes' walk) — finishing at Piazzale Michelangelo for sunset if the legs hold. It's the Florence day with the highest ratio of wonder to queue.