Another one of Florence’s must-see monuments, the church of Santa Croce, has turned into a museum with a 3 euro ticket price for visitors. Often called the Florentine Pantheon, around 1 million visitors per year crowd in to see the tombs of the city’s most famous sons: Galileo, Michelangelo and Dante (though his bones are buried elsewhere) and the frescoes of Giotto in the Bardi chapel.

This is the latest of four major religious monuments (the Duomo and baptistery, Santa Maria Novella and San Lorenzo) in the city to charge an admission price for visitors. Those wishing to pray or attend mass are still let in, without charge, from separate entrances. Critics say this is just one more step into turning one of the most famous cities in Italy definitively into an amusement park.

"Basically places of worship are becoming places of entertainment," said Antonio Paolucci the official responsible for Florence’s artistic heritage. "Unfortunately, museums have also lost their primary function — as places of education. I think about 98% of visitors today, foreign and Italian, enter without understanding the value of what they see."

Fees are unlikely to bother tourists on package tours — who often pay entrance fees in the tour price and have group reservations — but deter single visitors who will have to shell out money at every monument after waiting in long lines. Proponents of the fees say that the income will help preserve monuments for future generations and keep out the uninterested. On the first day the ticket office opened in Santa Croce, some 6,000 tickets were sold for profits of 18,000 euro or roughly $16,000 USD.

Related resources:
City Secrets: Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy
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