Florence Museum Time Allotments

It really depends on your interests and what else you want to do. The biggest time-eater will be the Uffizi. You can easily spend 4 hours there or you can sprint through it in 2. We decided to take our time and we ate lunch in the cafe in the Uffizi to break it up into a more manageable tour. The Accademia and Medici Chapels can be covered in about an hour each. I have not been to the other museums.

Museo di San Marco is a good hour or a bit longer, it's fairly small. The Accademia has some interesting paintings upstairs, but if your main interest is the Michelangelo sculptures, an hour can be enough. The Duomo (without climbing the dome or bell tower) will probably take an hour, another half hour if you include the baptistery. The Medici Chapel/Laurentian Library/San Lorenzo can take a couple of hours. Throw in another hour for Santa Maria Novella.

The Bargello has not been mentioned by the other posters. I'm thinking a couple of hours for this lovely museum - maybe my favorite in Florence. The Medici Chapels are also lovely and not as crowded as the Uffizi or Accademia. Don't forget to buy advance tickets for the Uffizi and Accademia or you will waste precious time waiting in very long lines.

It depends on your personal interests.

I'm not saying that you should stay such a short time that you can tell the taxi driver to wait for you outside with the engine on. However I don't recommend spending more than a couple of hours in any museum, no matter how big. Just concentrate on the top 10 most important works of art you want to see.

Going to a museum to see everything inside is like going to a famous great restaurant and order every item on the menu. You can't possibly enjoy it the food that way.

The Medici chapels won't take much time. Among other things, they suggest that the world's greatest sculptor of the nude male was--how should I say this--not quite as familiar with the female nude.

Uffizi - 3 hours minimum
Accademia - 1 hour minimum
Duomo - 1 hour minimum (more for dome, bell tower, baptistery)
Bargello - 1.5 hour minimum
Medici Chapels - 0.5 hour minimum

While I agree with djp, that time only starts once you are in side the doors of each museum. If you wait on lines, that has to be factored in. You might consider the tours that we did. We used Walks of Italy, and did their Florence in a Day tour. It combines their David, Duomo, and walking tour of the city in the a.m., with their Uffizi tour in the p.m. (These tours can also be done separately on different days for a little more.) The a.m. Session gave us a great overview of the city and the p.m. got us to the highlights of the Uffizi in three hours. (You can stay in the museum when the tour ends.) It's a bit pricey, but we felt pretty well educated about all the varied things we saw. If you look on their website, you can see all the things they cover in the tour. If nothing else, it can give you an idea of the weight to apply to the sites. The tour guide for each session was amazingly knowledgeable about their subjects.

Good point va.September will still be pretty busy, so definitely must PREBOOK Uffizi and Accademia.

Kent, too funny... but true!
The OP will actually see two good examples of this in Florence: the female nude sculpture in the Medici Chapels (as DH put it: "a man's body with b**bs on it") and the painting of the Holy Family in the Uffizi Gallery (Mary is a bit more muscular-looking than usually portrayed). Even in his painted works, you can tell that Michelangelo is first and foremost a sculptor.