O flos colende

What makes this festival worth noting is the deliberate absence of a single musical logic. A gospel choir follows Renaissance polyphony; ancient laude give way to Estonian minimalism. The cathedral absorbs it all without complaint. Bruno Zevi once wrote that Gothic architecture is music made spatial. Standing beneath Brunelleschi's dome while sound fills the nave, you begin to understand what he meant. All concerts are free and open to the public, beginning at 19:00.

The Pilgrims Gospel Choir, 12 March

Pop and swing in a Gothic nave. It is the sort of combination that looks wrong on paper until you are there. Gospel music shares more with Florentine sacred tradition than one might expect: both are built on communal breath, on repetition as a form of devotion, on the conviction that music reaches somewhere words cannot. The Pilgrims open the festival with an energy the cathedral will hold onto for weeks.

Tuscae Voces, 17 March

The ensemble brings Monteverdi and Sapiti into the space. Claudio Monteverdi needs no introduction; Bartolomeo Sapiti, a Florentine composer active in the late Renaissance, is less remembered than he deserves. To hear them together in this setting (the building they would have known, or one very like it) is a different kind of closeness to history.

Cappella Musicale della Basilica di San Lorenzo, 26 March

Charles Antoine Campion, an eighteenth-century composer of French-Italian parentage, wrote a body of sacred music that has never quite found its wider audience. The Cappella Musicale of San Lorenzo, one of Florence's oldest musical institutions with roots stretching back to the Medici, brings his work into the Duomo for an evening that rewards the curious.

Cappella Musicale della Cattedrale, 9 April

The cathedral's own ensemble performs works by Arvo Pärt and Mendelssohn. The pairing makes more sense than it seems: Pärt's tintinnabuli method strips sacred music to its barest harmonics, searching for something essential in the silence between notes. Mendelssohn, in his choral works, never quite left the church either. Together they form a double portrait of what European sacred music became after it stopped being a single, uncomplicated thing.

Ensemble Micrologus, 14 May

The closing concert is the most singular in ambition. Ensemble Micrologus, specialists in medieval music, perform a selection of laude from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The centrepiece is the first full musical reconstruction of Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Brother Sun, drawn from the oldest surviving manuscript sources. The Canticle, probably the first major literary work written in Italian, was composed around 1224, two years before Francis's death. To hear it reconstructed, eight centuries later, inside one of Italy's great cathedrals is not a small thing. The concert begins at 21:00 and is free, but requires advance reservation. Bookings open on 20 April 2026.

Plan Your Visit

All concerts are held at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Piazza del Duomo, Florence. The March and April evenings begin at 19:00; the closing Ensemble Micrologus concert on 14 May begins at 21:00. Admission is free throughout, with the exception of the final concert, which requires a reservation (available from 20 April 2026).