Using an eSIM in Florence

What Florence is like on a phone

Florence fills up with people staying two or three nights for the art, people using it as a base for Tuscany, and language students who settle in for a month. The centre is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour, which means you spend nearly all your time inside the old city. Outdoors the connection is consistently good; indoors it flips the moment you step into a museum or a church whose walls are a metre thick.

When you land

The city airport is Amerigo Vespucci (FLR), which is small and connects by the T2 tram straight into town. Plenty of people instead fly into Pisa (PSA), ride the Pisa Mover across to the railway station and take a train to Santa Maria Novella. Switch the eSIM on in the terminal, because you will be buying or showing a ticket on screen within minutes. The tram and the train in both hold a connection steadily, and you step out of the station a few minutes' walk from the cathedral.

Where coverage changes

Outdoors in the old centre it works almost everywhere. Inside the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace or Santa Croce it falls away enough that you should not plan to load anything while you are in there. Climbing the cathedral dome takes you up a staircase built into the wall with next to nothing, then hands the signal back when you emerge at the top. South of the river the climb to Piazzale Michelangelo sits high and open, one of the better spots in town for a clear video call. The tight lanes around the central market can put your map pin a street off.

What a day here costs in data

A day here goes on walking between timed museum slots, which means the map opens often but briefly, plus translating the wall labels, booking dinner and sending art photos to friends. That usually lands around a gigabyte a day, less than a city where you are riding transport all the time. If you stream an audio guide through every gallery or upload high-resolution clips each night, plan for roughly double.

Districts travellers ask about

• Duomo quarter: The piazza is busy from morning to dusk and midday speeds show it, yet climb Giotto's bell tower and you are above all of it with room to breathe.
• Oltrarno and Santo Spirito: The quieter side of the river, full of workshops, with streets a shade wider than the north bank, which makes it an easy place to sit down and work or call home.
• San Lorenzo and the Mercato Centrale: Stalls packed into narrow lanes nudge the map pin sideways; finding your way by a market door or the church façade beats trusting the arrow on screen.
• Piazzale Michelangelo and San Niccolò: The hillside viewpoint is among the best-connected spots in town and the obvious place to upload sunset photos, though at dusk everyone arrives at once and it slows for a while.

Day trips out of the city

• Siena: The coach climbs into the Tuscan hills with thin patches across open farmland; up in the town the area around the Campo is fine, but the steep lanes hemmed in by tall brick will push your position around.
• The Chianti wine roads: Winding roads between the vine-covered ridges have stretches with nothing at all, especially down in the dips; if you are driving, save the whole area offline and write down the estate addresses before you set off.
• Cinque Terre: The coastal railway spends most of its length inside tunnels, so service disappears and returns each time the train breaks into daylight; take the boat along the shore instead and it weakens noticeably whenever you pull away from the villages.