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Museo Horne
This pleasantly low-key museum is made up of 14th- and 15th-century Italian paintings, sculptures, ceramics, coins and other odds and ends left to the nation by British art historian and Florentinophile Herbert Percy Horne. Among the relatively minor art, you'll find the occasional biggie such as Giotto's Santo Stefano (St Stephen), though the museum is perhaps most interesting for its exquisite period furniture.
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Museo Marino Marini
If you have to ask 'who?' then this museum might not be for you. Housed in an ancient church, it contains almost 200 works by one of Italy's best 20th-century sculptors, Marino Marini, whose world, it seems, revolved around man and horse.
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Museo Nazionale del Bargello
Begun in 1254, the Palazzo del Bargello was originally the residence of the chief magistrate and then a police station. During its days as a police complex, many people were tortured in the medieval courtyard and, for a long time, the city's prisons were located here. It now houses the most comprehensive collection of Tuscan Renaissance sculpture in Italy.
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Museo Salvatore Ferragamo
Housed on the 2nd floor of a fortified Renaissance palazzo that takes up an entire block, this small museum displays some 80 years of fashionable footwear produced by the Ferragamo empire, including many shoes that dressed the feet of film stars and princesses. You can pop in on spec but book to be sure.
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Museo Stibbert
Florence's most bizarre museum, housed in a crumbling 14th-century Victorian-decorated palazzo, contains the legacy of Federico Stibbert (1838-1906), fan of military paraphernalia and hoarder extraordinaire. Expect everything from a Botticelli painting and magnificent 16th- to 19th-century armour to quaint, curious and useless junk. There's a nice shady garden to rest and regain your composure.
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Museo Storico-Topograficao 'Firenze com'era'
The 'Florence as it was' museum charts the city's development - particularly from the Renaissance to today - with paintings, models, topographical drawings and prints. The most intriguing part are the pictures and models of the old city centre destroyed in the 19th century to make way for Piazza della Repubblica.
Read more about Museo Storico-Topograficao 'Firenze com'era'
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Museo Zoologico La Specola
The Medici founded this rather fusty museum in the 1770s; it has a vast collection of preserved and pickled animals, and a ghastly section strewn with wax models of assorted and diseased bits of the human anatomy.
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Opificio delle Pietre Dure
One of the most beautiful and overlooked of Florence's museums is attached to a workshop established by Ferdinando I in 1558 to create decorative pieces in pietra dura for the Cappelle Medicee. Now situated in the old convent of San Niccolò, it displays 19th-century workbenches and exquisite 'paintings in stones'.
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Palazzo Nonfinito
Bernardo Buontalenti started work on this residence for the Strozzi family in 1593. He and others completed the Palladian-style 1st floor and courtyard but the upper floors were never completely finished, hence the building's name. Buontalenti's window designs and other details constitute a mannerist touch that takes the building beyond the classicist rigour of the Renaissance. The obscure Museo dell'Antropologia e Etnologia is housed here.
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Spedale degli Innocenti
Europe's first orphanage, opened in 1444, was Brunelleschi's first complete work as an architect. Andrea della Robbia decorated the elegant arcaded loggia in the 1490s with terracotta medallions of babies in swaddling clothes as an appeal for charity. Inside is Ghirlandaio's striking Adorazione dei Magi (Adoration of the Magi), along with an early and over-restored Madonna col Bambino e un Angelo (Madonna with Child and an Angel) by Botticelli.
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