Galleria dell'Accademia

People line up outside the Accademia in Florence for one thing, a block of marble carved by Michelangelo when he was in his twenties. His David stood for centuries outside the town hall in the open air, until 1873, when the city moved it indoors to protect it and built a domed alcove here to hold it, more than five metres of tensed young man about to fight.

The walk up to him passes some of Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures, the Prisoners, figures that seem to be struggling out of the raw stone, chisel marks still on them. Seeing them first changes how the finished David reads.

The gallery began in the 1780s as the teaching collection of Florence's art academy, and it keeps that character. Beyond the sculpture there are rooms of gold-ground Florentine paintings and a collection of old musical instruments, including a violin and a cello made by Antonio Stradivari for the Medici court.