Follow me in this tour on the hills of Florence. Into the silence of ancient roads, among olive groves and fascinating villas.

If you have already visited Florence, you might not notice how the countryside is close to the city centre. Florence rises at the bottom of a natural valley and you have to reach the top of one of the hills that surrounds it to complete your visit. From up there, the beauty of the landscape and the bird’s eye view over the city are really extraordinary.

And it’s right from there that in the Reinassance, at the end of 14 hundreds, the map maker at the Medici Court, Lorenzo Rosselli, got the ispiration to create one of the most beautiful old maps of Florence which still exist and is considered a fundamental visual document to know how Florence looked like in those times.

We are going to walk on the Bellosguardo hill among Reinassance churches, Italian style gardens, organic saffron fields and famous ancient villas such as the 16 century Ombrellino Villa. Here Galileo Galilei lived from 1616 to 1631 and created his revolutionary astronomical theory and Ugo Foscolo in 1812 composed his "Le Grazie" solemn poem.

One of the best moment of this Florence tour will come when on the top of the hill, we will enter in the garden of San Bartolome a Monte Oliveto Church. That’s the spot from where Leonardo da Vinci painted the famous Annunciation. That’s the church he painted it for.

Inside the church you will enjoy beautiful Reinassance frescos, the ancient cript with tombs of members of the Strozzi family and many more things that I don’t want to reveal right now. So shall we go? Let’s start our special Florentine walk and follow me this way!