Uffizi Gallery in Florence - accessing bookstores

I'm 99% sure that you cannot get to the bookstore from the cloakroom. The bookstore is a series of rooms and leads to the post office area and then outside.

Depending on your interests, it might be a good idea to tour the Vasari corridor separately. The Uffizi has recently added an entire new floor to the exhibit areas and both added new exihibits and moved some of the paintings from their former spots on the top floor. For example the Titian painting that I love is now in a totally different location closer to the end of the exhibit halls and on a lower floor. Formerly you would have seen at least 1/2 of the Uffizi galleries prior to getting to the door to the corridor. Now the Uffizi exhibits continue one floor down. It takes more time to see everything now. I don't know how the combined tours are handling this change.

As I recall the exit area is closed off from the entrance area. I am almost certain you can't access the bookstore except by walking through the museum.

I would suggest, particularly if your daughter wants to spend a fair amount of time with the art, booking an afternoon combined tour and giving yourself time at the museum in the morning. The combined tour really only looks at a few museum highlights, so you may want additional time with the collection. You could also visit the bookstore in the morning. You might contact Amici degli Uffizi by email and ask them if it's possible to buy books in the morning and store them in the coat check area before you go on your tour. I don't know if you'll get a reply, but I found them very helpful when I dealt with them in person.

After a tour of the corridor, the guide was able to talk the guard into taking me back to the museum. But that was clearly an unusual exception, and the guard refused to take along any others. So you really need to plan to leave the museum when you finish going through the corner.

One other point: The collection in the corridor is almost exclusively self-portraits, a few nice and interesting pieces but certainly not an artistic highlight. So if I had limited time in Florence, I would spend my time in the museum and skip the corridor. In fact I didn't visit the corridor until my fourth trip to Florence. And while I go to the Uffizi on every visit, I doubt I'll ever go back to the corridor.

A couple of amazing smaller museums in Florence are the convent of San Marcos (Fra Angelico) and the Bargello (a wonderful sculpture collection). If you want to go to either of them, plan carefully. Their hours are much shorter than the Uffizi and they are closed more days.

Thanks, Shirley and Sherry.