Florence for kids: walking tour and leather workshop

An adventure made for young explorers: a Florence walking tour for kids through the city’s most iconic corners — the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio and the tales hidden behind them — followed by a real leather workshop, where budding artisans design and stamp their very own bookmark.

The walk: history that feels like a story

The guide’s job on this tour is a specific one: make history feel like a story worth telling. How a goldsmith with no buildings to his name roofed the biggest cathedral of his age. Why one bridge in Florence survived the war when every other fell. What the butchers were doing on Ponte Vecchio before the goldsmiths arrived, and why they were evicted — the answer involves a Grand Duke’s nose. The route touches the Duomo, Piazza della Signoria and Ponte Vecchio, with a gelato stop where it is deserved.

The workshop: leather, the Florentine craft

Florence has worked leather since the Middle Ages, and the craft is still the city’s signature. In a real artisan workshop — benches, tools, the smell of hide — children design and stamp their own leather bookmark, choosing colours and patterns to make it truly theirs. The artisan guides their hands through the stamping, and the result goes home in a small pocket: a little piece of Florence, made by them, for keeps.

Practical information

• Best for children roughly from 5 to 13 — the stamping is simple enough for small hands and satisfying enough for big ones
• Private and paced by your family: the walk flexes, the stories match the ages, and nobody is marched anywhere
• Half a day in total, with the workshop slot booked to your date
• The other version of this formula ends in colour instead of leather: the walk with a marbled paper workshop
• Continuing to Rome? The family tours continue there: the animals and symbols hunt in the old Jewish quarter and Rome for kids by golf cart
• Kosher families: gelato and lunch stops are chosen around how you eat — tell me in advance and it is handled

Questions people ask

What do the children actually make?
A leather bookmark, designed and stamped by them — they choose the colours and the patterns, the artisan guides the tools. It is theirs in the full sense: no two come out alike.

What ages does it suit?
Roughly five to thirteen. The stamping is simple enough for small hands, and the workshop — a real one, not a stage set — is the part older children remember.

Is the workshop a real artisan’s shop?
Yes. Florence still lives on its leather trade, and the workshop is a working one: benches, tools, hides, and an artisan who does this for a living, not for tours.

How long does the whole thing take?
About half a day — the walk first, then the workshop. Private, so the pace is your family’s, with a gelato stop built in.

Leather or marbled paper — which workshop to choose?
Leather suits children who like making something sturdy and useful; the marbled paper version suits the ones who fall for colour and a bit of magic. Families with both kinds of children have been known to do both.