On Via dello Studio, a stone’s throw from Piazza del Duomo, lies a place that tastes of the past, where you can still breathe the air of the old Florentine bottega. Passersby look in through the windows to see a large “furnished” room with machines found in every modern crafts workshop – a milling machine, a circular saw – along with manual tools forged in steel, sometimes a few centuries old: stonemason’s chisel, gravers, hammers and the very same marble drill used by Renaissance artists.

This workshop is simply the modern location of the Opera del Duomo Bottega.
The old headquarters was sited on premises to the rear of the cathedral’s apse; it was later transferred to the adjoining building, today headquarters of the Museo dell’Opera: here sculptors worked beneath a large porticoed canopy which no longer exists. In the 1700s, the old courtyard was abandoned for the rotunda still found in Piazza delle Pallottole. The definitive move to the present location on Via dello Studio occurred around the mid XIX century.