Siena in a day from Florence: how to do it properly

Siena is the most common day trip from Florence and frequently done badly — too fast, wrong transport, wrong sequence of sights, arriving at the Piazza del Campo at noon when the sun is directly overhead and the crowd is at maximum density.

Done well, a day in Siena is one of the finest travel days in Italy. The city is complete in a way that Florence, with its sprawl and competing neighborhoods and tourist infrastructure, isn’t. Siena is an intact medieval city on three hills, with a central piazza that may be the most beautiful public square in Europe and a cathedral interior that competes for the same title.

Here is how to do it properly.

Transport: bus, not train

This is the most important piece of advice in this guide.

The train between Florence and Siena requires a change at Empoli or Chiusi and takes anywhere from 1 hour 40 minutes to 2 hours 20 minutes depending on connections. The train station in Siena is at the bottom of a steep hill, a 15-minute walk or funicular ride from the historic centre.

The direct SITA bus from Florence to Siena takes 1 hour 15 minutes, costs €8 return (pre-purchased — buy online or at the SITA counter at the Florence bus station, which is next door to Santa Maria Novella station), and drops you at Piazza Gramsci, a three-minute walk from the historic centre.

The bus is faster, cheaper, more direct, and drops you in a better location. There is genuinely no reason to take the train for this particular journey.

Buses run roughly every hour and are bookable online via SITA Toscana. Check the timetable before your day — early departures (7:30-8am from Florence) and early returns (5-6pm from Siena) tend to fill up in summer and at weekends.

Sequence: morning walk, midday Duomo, afternoon Piazza del Campo

The Piazza del Campo is Siena’s central fan-shaped piazza, divided into nine segments of brick representing the Council of Nine that governed medieval Siena. It slopes gently to the Palazzo Pubblico on the lower edge, which has a tower (the Torre del Mangia) and a museum (the Museo Civico) with the most important collection of Sienese painting.

The Campo is at its most beautiful in early morning light (before 9am) and at dusk (after 5pm). At 1pm in July, it’s a heat trap with nowhere to sit in shade.

The Duomo di Siena is one of the most extraordinary Gothic cathedrals in existence — striped black and white marble inside and out, a floor covered entirely in marble inlay narrative panels (visible only for a few months each year when the covers are removed), and a hexagonal pulpit by Nicola Pisano that is one of the defining works of medieval European sculpture.

Buy the Siena Opa Si pass (€20-25 depending on current pricing and season) that covers the Duomo, the baptistery below it, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (which holds Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà altarpiece), and the Panorama dal Facciatone viewpoint. Individual tickets are possible but the combined pass is better value.

Suggested sequence:

7:30am: Depart Florence by bus 8:45am: Arrive Siena, walk to Piazza del Campo 9am-10am: The Campo in morning light, Palazzo Pubblico exterior 10am-1pm: Siena Duomo, baptistery, Museo dell’Opera 1pm-2:30pm: Lunch near the Campo or in the side streets (see below) 2:30pm-4:30pm: Museo Civico (the Palazzo Pubblico interior), afternoon Campo 4:30pm-5pm: Wander, Enoteca, light shopping 5:15pm: Bus back to Florence (arriving 6:30pm)

What to eat in Siena

Siena has a distinct culinary tradition, separate from Florence.

Pici cacio e pepe: The thick hand-rolled pasta of southern Tuscany, dressed simply with Pecorino Romano and black pepper. Earthier than Roman cacio e pepe. Available in most trattorias.

Pici all’aglione: The same pasta with a sauce of tomato, garlic (aglione — a large mild garlic variety grown in the Val di Chiana), and olive oil. Simpler and better than it sounds.

Cinta Senese: The ancient striped pig breed of the Sienese hills, back from near-extinction. The cured meats (salami, soppressata) are outstanding. Buy from a norcineria near the market.

Panforte: The dense medieval spiced fruit cake, claimed as a Sienese invention (with disputed origins going back to the 13th century). Buy at a Sienese pasticceria rather than the tourist stall versions; the quality difference is significant.

For lunch: Osteria del Coro (Via di Pantaneto) is a reliable mid-range trattoria with honest Sienese cooking. La Sosta di Violante (Via di Pantaneto) is quieter and slightly more refined. Avoid the restaurants facing directly onto the Campo; they’re priced for the location, not the food.

The Palio: if you’re there in July or August

Siena’s Palio — the bareback horse race run twice yearly in the Piazza del Campo — is one of the most intense events in Italy. The July 2 Palio (Palio di Provenzano) and August 16 Palio (Palio dell’Assunta) are preceded by days of processions, rivalries between the seventeen contrade (city districts), and elaborate pageantry.

Watching from the Campo is free but requires arriving hours in advance to get a good position in the unreserved centre. The races themselves last about 90 seconds, but the surrounding experience takes the whole day.

Paid grandstand seats (around the perimeter of the Campo) cost €300-600 and must be booked months in advance — directly through the contrade or via specialist operators.

If you’re in Florence in July or August, the Palio is worth the day trip. Expect crowds, heat, and an intensity of civic emotion that modern city life rarely produces.

What people typically miss

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo: Houses the original marble panels from the Cathedral facade and, most importantly, Duccio’s Maestà — a massive double-sided altarpiece painted between 1308 and 1311 that is one of the peaks of medieval European painting. If you see only one thing in Siena after the Cathedral itself, it should be this.

The neighborhoods off the main tourist loop: The area around Fontebranda (the medieval public fountain below the Duomo) and the streets running north from the Campo toward Piazza Salimbeni have a lived-in quietness that the main routes lack.

The wine: Siena sits between the Chianti Classico zone to the north and the Brunello and Vino Nobile zones to the south. A glass at any decent enoteca in the city — try Enoteca Italiana in Fortezza Medicea, one of Italy’s best public wine libraries — covers all three with proper local knowledge.

Combining Siena with other stops

Siena and San Gimignano in one day is popular and very rushed — both cities deserve individual attention and the bus connections between them add complexity. If you want both, take a guided tour that handles the logistics; several operators run well-sequenced day trips covering Siena, San Gimignano, and a Chianti winery stop.

Siena and Monteriggioni (a perfectly preserved medieval walled village on the Francigena pilgrimage route, 15 km north of Siena) works better — Monteriggioni takes 90 minutes and the combination doesn’t feel rushed.

The Sienese school: what you’re looking at

Siena produced one of the great alternative traditions of European painting, running parallel to and in dialogue with the Florentine Renaissance without ever being absorbed by it. Understanding the distinction makes the art more legible.

Florentine painting, from Masaccio onward, was obsessed with three-dimensional space, anatomically correct figures, and the mathematical logic of perspective. Sienese painting, from Duccio and Simone Martini onward, valued something different: emotional intensity, rich colour and gold-leaf decoration, the expressive power of line, and a Byzantine-influenced hieratic quality that placed the spiritual weight of the image above naturalistic representation.

In practical terms: when you stand before Duccio’s Maestà in the Museo dell’Opera, you’re looking at a painting that is simultaneously more Byzantine than Florentine work of the same period (the gold ground, the stylised angels) and more psychologically acute (the faces of the Virgin and Christ Child have a tenderness that the gold-ground format was not supposed to allow for).

The tension between these traditions — the Sienese valuing the spiritual, the Florentine valuing the natural — is one of the central conversations of Italian Renaissance art. Siena is where one side of that conversation lives.

Getting into the Duomo properly

The Siena Duomo is one of the most complex admission situations in Tuscany, and getting it wrong means missing significant parts of the experience.

The Opa Si Pass covers:

• Entry to the Cathedral itself (free on certain days — check current policy)
• The Piccolomini Library (inside the Cathedral, Pinturicchio’s fresco cycle depicting the life of Pope Pius II — one of the great fresco cycles of the late 15th century)
• The Battistero di San Giovanni (the Baptistery below the Cathedral, with a font containing bronze relief panels by Donatello, Ghiberti, and Jacopo della Quercia — effectively a Renaissance sculpture museum in a single room)
• The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (with the Duccio Maestà)
• The Panorama dal Facciatone (the unfinished nave of the Duomo Nuovo — the expanded cathedral that Siena started building in the 1330s and abandoned after the Black Death killed half the population — is now an open-air viewing platform with extraordinary views over the city)

The Panorama dal Facciatone specifically is underrated. You climb up through the unfinished structure — you can see where the walls stop, where the ambition exceeded the capacity — and emerge onto a view that encompasses the entire city and the Tuscan hills behind it. For a clear-sky day, it’s among the better views in Tuscany.

Siena by night: if you can stay

If you’re in Siena for an evening — which requires overnighting, as the last bus back to Florence is around 9-10pm — the city at night is something different from the day-trip version.

The Campo at 10pm, when the restaurants have closed their terraces and the tourist volume has diminished, has a medieval quality that the busier hours obscure. The bats fly in from the surrounding hills, circling the Torre del Mangia. The stone of the Campo releases the day’s heat slowly. You can hear your own footsteps.

For dinner: Osteria Le Logge (Via del Porrione, near the Campo) is one of the best restaurants in Siena — sophisticated, locally focused, not cheap (mains €25-30) but worth it for a proper Sienese meal. Book in advance.

For the complete Tuscany day trip comparison, see the Florence day trips guide. The Siena city guide covers the full range of what the city offers, and the Chianti day trip guide explains the drive between the two for the car option.