The two designer outlets near Florence: which one to pick, and the return bus times that decide your day

There are two designer outlets within an hour of Florence, in opposite directions, and they are not alternatives to each other. One sells Gucci and Saint Laurent. The other sells Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein across more than 130 units. Picking the wrong one costs you a whole day of a short trip.

The thing that actually decides the day, though, is not the brand list. It is the return bus. Both outlets publish their opening hours and both operators publish their timetables, and when you put the two side by side they do not line up.

They are not the same shop

Both get called “the Florence outlet” and the difference between them is the single most useful thing on this page. They are about 70 km apart, one southeast of the city and one north, and you would not visit both.

If you are not in the market for a four-figure handbag, the luxury outlet is a museum you cannot afford. That is not a criticism of it. It is a very good shop for the thing it is. But people arrive at Leccio expecting a day of bargains across a broad range and find fifteen designer houses selling last season at designer prices minus a percentage.

The bus timetables, and the holes in them

Both operators publish their times in full. Set them against the closing times from the table above and the day plans itself.

Three things fall out of that table, and each one can ruin an afternoon.

• Barberino shuts at 20:00 and the last bus leaves at 18:30. The extra hour of opening that makes Barberino look like the longer day is an hour the shuttle cannot reach. If you are on the bus, your closing time is 18:30, not 20:00.
• Barberino's middle departure traps you. Take the 14:00 out, arrive about 14:30, and the only ways back are 15:00, which buys you half an hour of shopping, or 18:30, which buys you four hours. There is nothing between the two.
• The Mall has a two-hour-fifty hole in the mornings. Returns run at 9:45 and 10:10, and then not again until 13:00. The shops open at 10:00. So the 8:40 out, which looks like the efficient early start, puts you on site before opening and then gives you nothing to come home on until the afternoon.

The practical reading for The Mall is to take a mid-morning bus rather than the first one, and for Barberino in winter to take the 9:30 or the 11:30 and treat 18:30 as a hard deadline you need to be standing at the stop for.

The Barberino run is the one you can hold a seat on in advance, and it is worth reading the rating on it carefully rather than at a glance.

Sixteen euros, and the rating needs explaining

Shared Shuttle Bus to Barberino Designer Outlet

★★★★★★★★★★1.0 · 1 reviews

Deal with the rating first: it shows one star, and that is one person's opinion rather than a verdict. A single review is noise in either direction and we are not going to dress it up as anything else. What the listing is, factually, is a return seat on a 30-minute coach from Piazza della Stazione for 16 euros, which is what the next section weighs against the alternatives. Winter departures are 9:30, 11:30 and 14:00, back at 13:00, 15:00 and 18:30, and that last one leaves 90 minutes before the outlet closes. Show the ticket at the information point for the Fashion Passport discount card.

from 16 €

per adult · return · about 30 min each way · free cancellation up to 24h · winter timetable to 31 March 2027

Check availability→

One naming trap worth knowing if you are searching for tickets. Trenitalia's own station index contains an entry called Firenze The Mall, which is a bus stop rather than a railway station, and it sends people looking for a train that does not exist. The station guide has the three that actually matter to someone arriving by train.

What getting there costs

The spread here is wider than for almost anything else in Tuscany, and it is worth seeing laid out before you book the convenient-looking option.

The private transfer costs fourteen times the shared shuttle and carries almost no evidence. The five on sale for The Mall that day had between zero and ten reviews each. At 222 euros a head for a half day, that is a lot of money riding on very little.

There is also an asymmetry worth naming, because it shapes what you can book. The booking platforms sell a cheap shared shuttle to Barberino and nothing shared at all to The Mall, where the only listings are those private cars. The Mall's own bus is sold by Busitalia directly, and that is the next section, because the link does something alarming.

And one we would not book. The private transfers to The Mall run 222 to 268 euros a head for about five hours, door to door from a Florence hotel. For a group of four with a lot of bags and no interest in timetables, that arithmetic can work. For two people going shopping, it is the price of the thing you were hoping to buy at a discount.

The security warning on the official ticket link

This one is worth a section because it looks exactly like a scam and is not one, and because the opposite conclusion is the dangerous one.

The Mall's own site has a button marked Purchase bus ticket. It points at themall.busitaliashop.it, and that address serves a security certificate that does not match it. Every browser will stop you with a warning.

We checked what the certificate actually says. It was issued to Busitalia Sita Nord S.r.l. for *.fsbusitalia.com, and it covers only fsbusitalia.com and its subdomains, which does not include the themall.busitaliashop.it name the link uses. So the certificate is real and belongs to the real bus operator. What is broken is the configuration, not the company.

Two things follow, and the second matters more than the first. The warning on this particular link is a misconfiguration rather than an attack. But that is not a reason to start clicking through certificate warnings, on this trip or any other, because the next one may not be benign. If you are not comfortable, buy from the driver or at the stop instead of overriding your browser on a page where you are about to type a card number.

Is it worth a day of a short trip?

The two largest pools of public opinion disagree about The Mall, and they disagree by enough that the disagreement is the answer.

Four tenths of a point across ten thousand opinions is a real split, and the shape of it is familiar from anywhere that sells a promise. People who go for a specific thing at a specific discount come back satisfied. People who go for a day out come back having spent four hours in a retail park.

So the question to ask yourself before committing a day is not whether the outlet is good. It is whether you can name the item you are going for. If you cannot, a day in Florence is a better day, and the city has its own leather and paper trades that an outlet does not touch. On a short trip, the outlet is the first thing to cut. How many days Florence actually needs covers what the competition for that day looks like.

Driving, and why it changes the answer

With a car, most of this page stops applying, and both outlets become genuinely easy. Parking is free at both and the motorway does the work.

For The Mall: the A1 towards Rome, out at the Incisa-Reggello exit, right towards Pontassieve and on to Leccio. The outlet is on the left just past the village. For Barberino: the A1 the other way, towards Bologna, and the Barberino di Mugello exit.

The thing to get right is the Florence end rather than the motorway end. The historic centre is a restricted traffic zone with camera enforcement, and the fines arrive at home months later. If you are picking up a hire car for the day, take it from a depot outside the zone and do not drive it back in. The car hire guide has the zone, the deposits and what the desks add at the counter.

Four things worth carrying into the planning.

• Decide which outlet before you look at buses. They sell different things and the wrong one is a wasted day whatever time you get back.
• Work backwards from the return. At Barberino in winter that is 18:30 and there are only three. At The Mall, avoid landing in the 10:10 to 13:00 gap.
• Check the fare when you book. We could not read The Mall bus price and would rather say so than pass on a number we have not seen.
• Timetables here change twice a year. The Barberino service above runs to 31 March 2027. Confirm with the operator in the week you travel.

Questions