Why choosing an artisan tour?
This tour is a valid alternative to visiting museums, as it is a highly educational experience and allows you to move outdoors between one shop and another instead of dedicating the whole time to indoor museum.
The tour offers the opportunity to get in touch with Florentine artisans and to listen to anecdotes of their work: in our daily lives we are so used to buying hastily a finished product, that we no longer ask ourselves how is it made. Well, craftsmen always have an story to tell.

Tour description:
We will immerse ourselves in an unusual dimension, the opposite of mass production, and we will also learn how to recognize what quality means. Quality is not found in the strong smell of leather, and it is is not necessarily in the sparkling surface of gold. This is what real workshops are: holy places where daily experience has more value than a much advertised trademark. It is an engaging experience, creating empathy and involvement and allowing one to grasp the value of handcrafted artifacts.

Places to visit: Patient and expert hands will be able to demonstrate with few words that “haste makes waste”. The wealth of Florence lies not only in museums and ancient monuments but in its having preserved many of ancient artisan activities in the historic center.

The high Florence craftmanship, a treasure to discover and preserve:
In the past, all jobs were called Arts, guilds held the secrets of the different crafts and jealously guarded the principles of high quality in order to guarantee the best possible result for the market and the city’s wealth.

Who are the artisans today in Florence: let’s find out together
There are few ambassadors of this handwork repertoire. They live in industrious hives mainly helped by families who care so much about their craft or in shops run by young entrepreneurs who are enthusiastic of ancient technologies. Visiting the shops of Florence one feels that time has stopped.

What will be done during the artisan tour?
Exploring far and wide the city centre, we will have the opportunity to see slow accurate work of pottery decorators while painting a medieval motif on a ceramics plate, the patience of the slabs workers in a Florentine mosaic workshop as they’re composing precious stones on a table top. We will weigh goldsmith’s tools, still today operating to forge unique jewels entirely made by hand. Everything seems even too simple, when the artisans’ hand decorate paper in the marbling technique: One feel enchanted, relaxed and surprised to realizing the result. There will be time to pop into an old messy store for painting tools and to visit a family-run leather shop, now at the fourth generation. Still today every item is hand made: genuine leather is hand cut and then is slowly sewn in order to become and artfull product. The tour will include a visit either to a renown family run workshop specialized in copper sheet engraving or to an ancient perfumery workshop, where we will satisfy our sense of smell after having mostly used our eyes and fingers. After such an interesting experience let's visit the Accademia Gallery and discover sculptural techniques used by Michelangelo Buonarroti!

• Duration: 3 hours
• Meeting point and starting time: The time and place for meeting point to be arranged with visitors.
• Languages and accessibility: Available in Italian and English. Due to the little size of artisans workshops, groups can not be bigger than 10 people. Not available on Sundays. Somewhere the uneven road surface may make travelling in a wheelchair difficult.
• Prices Price changes according to number of participants. Price including taxes due by Law.
• From one to five people: € 230,00 in total
• From six to ten people: € 40,00 each
• Children under 10 years old are free
• Included in the price: Private Tour by Licensed Guide. No extra costs for visiting the workshops. According to availability, tour includes five stops among the following places: Leather workshop; marbling paper workshop; Florentine Mosaic; Jewelry: gold and silver ornament making; Hand decorated pottery; Press print – engraving; Perfumery