First 2 hours in Florence

Go to your museum first. Crowds get crazy at tourist attractions, so the earlier you go the better, and occasionally may get dense on a few connecting alleys, notably the one linking the railway station to Duomo. But as soon as you escape to side streets, crowds get much more reasonable.

Get tickets for the Accademia in advance, you will skip the non-ticket line; be sure to get there a bit before your appointment time.

Thanks.

Clarification: I'm going to reserve tickets over the phone for Accademia, but I understand that I still need to queue up to pay for and collect the tickets - I thought if I reserve tickets then it feels silly to use the precious early hours when there are fewer people in a museum (do they control the number of people inside, i.e. waiting for people to leave before letting more people in?) when we could see the Gates of Paradise, Duomo, etc.?

Or is Florence different that it is big enough so the piazzas don't feel crowded even in May?

Thanks in advance.

Note that the Doors of Paradise at the Baptistry are excellent copies; the originals are at the Museo dell' Opere del Duomo. Rarely a line.

If you have a voucher for tickets, there is a separate line for the Accademia and the Uffizi.

Where will you be coming from for the day trip?

I highly recommend the Walks of Italy walking tour of Florence. You meet at 8:30 at the Piazza San Marco, check in and then the tour walks a block or so to the Accademia, arriving just as they open. Your tickets are provided and you walk right in. You then spend an hour at the Accademia, which was plenty of time. By the end of the hour it was getting crowded and when we left, there was a long line to enter. There were only 10 of us on our tour. I think they limit it to 12.

From there, you walk to the Baptistery and the Duomo, then walk through the heart of the city. The tour ends at the Ponte Vecchio around noon. Marco, our tour guide, provided great suggestions for lunch.

We also signed up for the tour of the Uffizi, which started at 2:15. There were only 6 of us for this and Marco didn't even use the headsets. Again, we walked right in. The Uffizi was wonderful. There's nothing like standing in front of the Birth of Venus! We didn't finish until 6:00 and were free to stay until closing.

The problem is there was so much to see other than those two tours, which would pretty much eat up your entire day. You might consider the morning tour, which is a great overview, then selecting the things you want to do in the afternoon.

My wife and I got to see the gates of Paradise when the original panels were on the doors. That was August, 1966. On November 4, 1966, the Arno spilled over its banks and flooded Florence. The panels on the doors were dislodged. Luckily the grating around the doors trapped them and they were recovered.

It was in Florence, August 10, 1966, that my wife and I shared our first kiss.