Piazzale Michelangelo

When architect Giuseppe Poggi designed this panoramic terrace in the mid 1800s, he envisioned a grand museum showcasing all of Michelangelo’s masterworks. The museum never materialized (it’s now a café) but the bronze David replica made it up the hill anyway, hauled by nine pairs of oxen in 1873. The square was part of Florence’s makeover during its brief stint as Italy’s capital, complete with French-style boulevards and an 8-kilometer tree-lined road that winds to this terrace, where a plaque beneath the loggia reads: ‘Giuseppe Poggi, Florentine architect. Look around you, here is his monument.’

Today the piazzale is Florence’s most famous viewpoint, thronged with tour buses and travelers angling for sunset shots of the Duomo. The view Poggi engineered turned out to be more enduring than the capital it was built to celebrate.