For around ten days, between early and mid-September, Florence sounds different every evening. One night it’s a Renaissance courtyard, the next a terrace overlooking the city, then a historic garden near Porta Romana. This is the Firenze Jazz Festival, and rather than an event built around a single stage, it’s a different way to move through the city for a couple of weeks.
Florence Jazz Festival
What it’s all about
Born as a jazz festival, over the years it has opened up to different genres, reggae, electronic music, singer-songwriters and more experimental sounds, while keeping its original format: a programme spread across the city, bringing concerts to squares, historic villas, cloisters and local venues instead of concentrating everything in one arena.
How it works: concerts all around the city
During the first part of the festival, concerts take place in different parts of Florence, almost always in the evening and often with free admission or affordable tickets. This is when the festival moves around the most: one day in a garden, the next in a historic venue, then on a panoramic terrace.
The festival wraps up with a more concentrated weekend, when the programme moves to a main stage with bigger names and a larger audience. For two or three evenings, the festival stops being spread across the city and becomes one main event.
Florence Jazz Festival
The places the festival moves through
Villa Bardini, on the Oltrarno hillside, usually hosts some of the first evenings. Its garden is a natural fit for open-air concerts, with the city below as daylight fades.
Rifrullo Firenze, along via di San Niccolò, and Vip's Bar in Piazzale Michelangelo are more informal stops, the kind of places where you might end up catching a concert even if you hadn’t planned to. Not far away, Conventino Caffè Letterario brings the festival to a more intimate setting, deeper into Oltrarno.
The terrace at Forte Belvedere adds a different viewpoint over Florence, high above the surrounding neighbourhoods. The amphitheatre at Villa Strozzi also often features in the programme, along with Santarosa Bistrot by the Arno and Habana 500, one of the younger spots on Florence’s nightlife scene.
The venues change slightly from one edition to the next, places such as Anfiteatro delle Cascine, on the other side of the city, sometimes join the programme, but the idea stays the same: concerts scattered across gardens, terraces and local venues rather than concentrated in one place.
The final weekend moves to Giardino delle Scuderie Reali in Porta Romana, home to the Main Stage: a larger space designed for the busiest evenings, but still only a short distance from the neighbourhoods the festival has passed through in the previous days.
Getting there from the two campsites
If you’re staying at one of the two hu campsites in the area, here’s how to reach the festival.
From hu Firenze camping in town, in via Generale C. A. dalla Chiesa in the south of Florence, bus line 14 heads towards the city centre and the neighbourhoods where the festival is spread out.
From hu Firenze Certosa camping in town, near Impruneta, bus line 37 takes you directly to Porta Romana, the area hosting the final weekend.
In both cases, once you reach the city centre, the other festival venues can be explored on foot through Oltrarno.
Firenze Jazz Festival
A festival to enjoy one stop at a time
If you happen to be in Florence during these September weeks, you’ll find a city that changes pace after dark for a while: courtyards open to the public, terraces where music replaces the usual aperitivo, and neighbourhoods you might normally pass through quickly becoming destinations for the evening.
Perhaps the best way to experience the festival is the same way the programme moves through the city: without trying to see everything, choosing a few stops and leaving some room for whatever you discover along the way.
