Florence for digital nomads

Best cafes

Florence's cafe culture is not one thing. It is the marble-topped Belle Époque rooms in the centre that have been serving coffee in tiny cups since before unification; it is the third-wave espresso bars where the barista will tell you which Ethiopian lot is in the hopper this week; it is the neighbourhood pasticcerie where pensioners stand at the zinc at 06:00 and the bar towel has not been replaced since the nineties; it is the juice-and-bagel shops along the shopping spines that exist for the lunchtime office crowd; and it is the riverside cake counters and tea rooms tucked into the side streets where almost no out-of-town visitor ever finds them. The twelve below cover all of it. They are ranked, loosely, by how much we think a thoughtful visitor will get out of them — not by Instagrammability, not by proximity to the Duomo. Several open before 07:00 and several do not open until the afternoon; read the hours before you walk. Addresses are cited verbatim from OpenStreetMap so you can drop them into a map without translation.