Choosing gelato in Florence is a bit like choosing dinner: the first place with a giant painted cone rarely deserves your gelato budget.
Here's how to spot the real thing, artigianale and low and matte with no neon flavours, plus the handful of gelaterie we'd actually send a friend to, from Vivoli to the Oltrarno.
Ask a Florentine and they'll swear gelato was invented right here, somewhere between a Medici banquet and a clever sixteenth-century cook. True or not, it's a claim the city has earned. But nobody tells you this before you land: not every gelateria deserves your gelato budget. Choosing where to eat gelato in Florence is a bit like choosing where to have dinner. You wouldn't sit down at the first trattoria with a laminated menu taped to the window, and you shouldn't settle for the first gelateria with a cone the size of your head painted on its sign. The good one is usually a five-minute walk past the obvious one, and that walk is almost always worth it.
How to spot the real thing
The tell is easier than you'd think. Skip anything piled into towering peaks in colours that don't exist in nature: a neon-green pistachio or a violently purple blueberry means you've found a tourist trap, not a gelataio. Real gelato sits low and a little matte in its tray, made with real ingredients and less air whipped in for show. Look for the words artigianale, nostra produzione or produzione propria on the sign. They mean it's made on the premises, not trucked in from a factory outside town.
One more rule, ours: be wary of fashion flavours. No charcoal, no glitter, nothing that needs a paragraph of explanation before you'll trust it. The classics earned their place. Fruit that tastes like the fruit on the label, dark chocolate that means it, a cloud of fresh whipped cream on top.
Where we'd actually send you
We'll be honest: we're the kind of Florentines with two gelaterie and not much curiosity for the rest. Everyone queues at Vivoli for the famous crema, usually drowned in an affogato, and it's lovely. We won't argue. But when we go we skip the crema and head straight for the banana, apricot or strawberry, which we've ordered since we were children and still think nobody in this city has matched. For chocolate and whipped cream our loyalty splits between Gelateria dei Neri and Venchi, the historic chocolate house that was doing this long before "artisanal" became a word anyone needed.
If you'd rather explore than borrow our habits, two more are worth your time. La Sorbettiera, in the quiet of Piazza della Passera in the Oltrarno, makes a sorbet worth the detour on its own. And Badiani keeps coming up for good reason, especially for its Buontalenti.
None of this is the definitive ranking, because there isn't one. A favourite gelateria is personal, like a favourite restaurant or a favourite street corner, and the fun is in finding the one (or two) that become yours. If you're staying with us, ask at check-in for our guest map: the same hand-picked list of addresses we'd give a friend visiting Florence for the first time, gelaterie included, gathered over years of eating our way through the city one cone at a time.