A new airport for Florence?

Anyone who has passed through Florence's Amerigo Vespucci Airport more than once will have formed an opinion of it. It's small. It's often crowded. The runway is short and awkwardly oriented, aimed more or less directly at Monte Morello, which means a lot of modern aircraft simply can't use it. It has not changed meaningfully since 1999. It is, in other words, a very Italian airport -- functional, a little chaotic, somehow charming in spite of itself (for example I always enjoy the bar there).

So when Toscana Aeroporti announced plans for an entirely new terminal designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, featuring a 19-acre working vineyard on the roof (!) the reaction was predictable: excitement, skepticism, and the quiet Italian shrug that accompanies most ambitious public projects. Vedremo. We'll see.

To be fair, the plans are striking. The concept is to drape a 50,000-square-meter terminal beneath a gently sloping vineyard roof -- 38 rows of vines, harvested by a leading Tuscan vintner, with wine aged in cellars directly beneath the passenger hall. The architects describe it as peeling the Tuscan landscape up from the ground and sliding an airport underneath. The roofline is carefully engineered so that the building is invisible from Brunelleschi's Duomo. In a city as protective of its skyline as Florence, that is a meaningful gesture.

Inside, a skylit central Piazza would bring arrivals and departures face to face across an open atrium. Solar panels woven between the vine rows, evaporative cooling from the planting beds, direct tram access -- the whole thing is designed to be a sustainable landmark, a new front door to the city that actually looks like Tuscany rather than a regional airport from 1999.

The runway, too, would be transformed: reoriented 90 degrees to run parallel to the A11 autostrada, finally clearing the approach path that has kept larger aircraft away for decades. If that happens, Florence becomes a meaningfully different hub -- one that might eventually attract long-haul routes rather than funneling visitors through Rome or Milan.

The current master plan builds on a framework that dates to 2014. Early projections called for phase one completion by 2026 -- a date that has come and gone without a shovel in the ground. In November 2025, the project cleared a genuine milestone when Italy's Ministry for the Environment published its Environmental Impact Assessment decree, confirming the runway alignment and blessing the mitigation measures. Progress, real progress.

What remains is the multi-agency Services Conference -- the final authorization step before construction can begin. This had not concluded as of early 2026. A reasonable estimate for phase one, covering the new runway and initial terminal, is sometime in the late 2020s. The full project runs to 2035.

Readers who have spent any time in Italy will recognize this rhythm. The environmental decree took over a decade. The conference is next. Then come the contracts, the appeals, the revised contracts. The vineyard will be planted when it's planted.

What this means for your trip

If you're visiting Florence in the next few years, nothing on the ground has changed for arriving passengers -- you'll still take the T2 tram from the terminal into the city center and be in Piazza Santa Maria Novella in about twenty minutes. That's €1.70 and one of the better airport commutes in Italy. Pisa's Galileo Galilei Airport remains the stronger option for budget carriers and routes not served by FLR. The new Florence airport, like many beautiful things in this country, will arrive in its own time.