The Sound Hits You First
It’s a dull thud — leather on sand, or maybe a fist on someone’s ribs, hard to tell from the grandstand. Then a roar from the crowd in Piazza Santa Croce, the kind that vibrates in your chest. A player goes down, rolls, gets up bloodied, and charges back in. This is Calcio Storico, and this is Florence on June 24, the feast day of San Giovanni Battista (St. John the Baptist), the city’s patron saint.
Most patron saint festivals in Italy involve a procession, maybe some candles, a mass. Florence decided centuries ago that wasn’t enough. So they added a Renaissance blood sport, a 500-person costume parade, and one of the best fireworks shows in the country — all packed into a single June day.
Twenty-Seven Against Twenty-Seven
Calcio Storico gets described as a mix of football, rugby, wrestling, and bare-knuckle boxing, which is accurate enough but doesn’t capture the feel. Twenty-seven players per side, dressed in Renaissance-era costumes, on a sand-covered pitch in Piazza Santa Croce. The objective is simple: get the ball into the other team’s goal. The rules are, generously speaking, minimal. Punching is allowed. Headlocks are allowed. What’s not allowed is a shorter list, and even that seems loosely enforced.
The sport traces back to the 16th century, when Florentine aristocrats played it partly for exercise and partly to prove they weren’t soft. The most famous match — the one every Florentine knows — happened on February 17, 1530, during the Siege of Florence. While Imperial troops surrounded the city, the defenders set up a match in full view of the enemy. Whether this was brave or insane probably depends on your perspective, but it’s very Florentine.
Four teams represent the city’s historic quarters: Santa Croce (blue), Santo Spirito (white), Santa Maria Novella (red), and San Giovanni (green). Semifinals happen in early June. The final is always June 24. The players are local men — not professional athletes, though some of them could probably hold their own in a boxing ring — who train for months beforehand. The rivalry between quarters is real. This isn’t heritage theater.
What the Grandstand Feels Like
The logistics of actually watching a Calcio match are worth spelling out, because they’re not obvious.
Tickets go on sale in spring, usually through the official Calcio Storico Fiorentino website. They sell out. Not ‘they might sell out’ — they sell out, often within days. Prices vary from standing areas to grandstand seats; the grandstand is worth it if you can get tickets, because standing at the edges of the piazza means seeing about 40% of what’s happening through other people’s heads.
Sand gets trucked into the piazza beforehand, temporary stands go up, and the whole square transforms into something that genuinely resembles a small colosseum. Before the match itself, there’s a corteo storico — a historical parade of over 500 people in meticulously researched Renaissance costumes. Flag throwers doing acrobatic tosses, drummers, soldiers, nobles. The parade starts at Piazza Santa Maria Novella, winds past the Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio, and enters Santa Croce. It takes a while. It’s worth watching.
Then the match starts, and the atmosphere shifts from pageantry to something more primal. The crowd noise is constant and intense. Players come out of scrums bleeding from the nose or limping. The physicality is not theatrical — it’s real, and it’s startling if you’re not expecting it. I’ve read accounts from people who found it disturbing, which is fair. It’s not for everyone. But it is, without question, one of the most extraordinary sporting events you can see in Europe.
If you can’t get match tickets, the corteo is free to watch from the streets, and honestly the parade is half the experience.
The River Catches Fire
After the blood and sand comes the sky. The Fochi di San Giovanni — the fireworks — launch from around Piazzale Michelangelo at roughly 10pm and are, by any measure, spectacular. The display reflects off the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio is silhouetted against bursts of color, and the Duomo’s dome catches the light in a way that feels almost staged. Except it’s not staged — it’s just Florence.
Best viewing spots, honestly assessed:
Piazzale Michelangelo is close to the launch site and dramatic, but it gets absurdly crowded. People start arriving by late afternoon. If you go, commit to spending several hours there.
Ponte Santa Trinita and the Lungarno riverbanks give you the classic reflection shots. Also very crowded, but the vibe is good — families, couples, groups with wine bottles.
Ponte alla Carraia is slightly less packed and the angles are solid. My recommendation if you want a balance between view quality and personal space.
Locals bring picnic blankets, wine, food. It’s not a bad approach. The evening is long, the wait is real, and having something to eat makes it significantly more pleasant.
The Parts Nobody Warns You About
June 24 is one of the most crowded days in Florence’s calendar, and Florence is already a city that struggles with crowd density. The historic center is essentially impassable from mid-morning through the fireworks. Walking from Santa Croce to the Duomo, normally a ten-minute stroll, can take three times that.
It’s also late June in Tuscany, which means heat. Proper heat — mid-30s Celsius, often higher in the stone-walled streets where there’s no shade. Carry water. Wear a hat. Sunscreen. The practical stuff that’s boring to read but miserable to forget.
Many museums and churches offer free admission on the patron saint day, which sounds great until you realize that everyone else knows this too. Lines at the Uffizi on June 24 are a special kind of punishment. If free museum entry matters to you, target the smaller museums — the Bargello, the Palazzo Davanzati — where the crowds are manageable.
Dining is another pinch point. Half the restaurants in the center are fully booked for dinner, and the other half have long waits. Book ahead, or do what a lot of Florentines do: eat street food. Lampredotto — a tripe sandwich that’s better than it sounds — from one of the city’s traditional cart vendors is the correct choice. Pair it with a glass of Chianti from a bar and you’re sorted.
Getting around after the fireworks is genuinely difficult. Much of the center is closed to traffic. Buses are rerouted. Phone signal gets patchy in the crowd density. Have a plan for getting back to your accommodation, and accept that it will take longer than you expect.
Getting There and Staying Somewhere
Florence is well-connected by rail — high-speed trains from Rome take about 90 minutes, from Milan about two hours. Trip.com is decent for bundling flights and hotels if you’re coming from further afield, though for European travel the train is almost always the better option.
For accommodation, book early. June is peak season in Florence regardless of the festival, and June 24 specifically pushes prices up further. The areas around Santa Croce and the Oltrarno are ideal for being close to both the Calcio and the fireworks, but anywhere in the historic center works — the city is walkable.
If you want to see the Calcio and fireworks without dealing with logistics yourself, GetYourGuide lists guided experiences around the festival. I haven’t used one personally, but the reviews suggest they handle the crowd navigation reasonably well, which on this particular day is not nothing.
Lampredotto and the Rest
A brief word on food, because Florence takes it seriously. The festival falls in summer, so lighter Tuscan fare — panzanella (bread salad), ribollita if you can find it despite the heat, bruschetta with fresh tomatoes — is everywhere. But the star of street food in Florence, any day of the year, is lampredotto. It’s the fourth stomach of a cow, slow-simmered, served in a bread roll with salsa verde. If you’re grimacing, I understand. Try it anyway. The sandwich carts near the Mercato Centrale and Sant’Ambrogio market are the ones to find.
For a proper sit-down meal, bistecca alla fiorentina is the obvious choice, but you need a reservation and a budget — a good one for two people runs €80-120 depending on the restaurant. Trattoria Mario near the San Lorenzo market does a solid version at reasonable prices, but the line starts early.
Why the Quarters Still Matter
Here’s the thing about Calcio Storico that’s easy to miss if you’re watching as a tourist: the players aren’t performing. The neighborhood rivalry is genuine. These are men from specific Florentine quarters — the same quarters that have existed since the medieval period — and when they step onto that sand, the people cheering for them are their actual neighbors. The butcher, the bar owner, the guy who fixes bikes on Via dei Neri.
Florence markets itself on the Renaissance — Botticelli, Brunelleschi, the Medici. That’s all real and all worth seeing. But the city underneath the tourism layer is fiercer and stranger than the galleries suggest. June 24 is the day that version of Florence surfaces, loud and unpolished and covered in sand.
The walk back to the hotel after the fireworks is quiet. The crowds thin out surprisingly fast once the last rockets fade. Your shoes are dusty, your phone is dead from taking too many photos that didn’t turn out well, and the trattoria you wanted to try was closed by the time you got there. But somewhere on a side street, someone’s still singing, and the smell of gunpowder hasn’t quite cleared from the river.
