Castello di Verrazzano: What the Six Tours Cost, and Why Its Own Booking Page Does Not Work

Verrazzano is the Chianti estate most people end up at, because it is the closest to Florence, it keeps proper opening hours and it takes bookings. Our guide to the Chianti estates already says that much.

That guide also already lists the two headline prices, 36 euros for the short tour and 74 with lunch, taken from the estate in September. So this page is not here to repeat them. It is here for the four experiences it does not list, the departure times, and the thing we found while checking: the estate’s own English tours page cannot take your booking.

The six experiences, and what each costs

All six come from the estate’s own booking system, read on 6 October 2026. Our main Chianti guide carries the first and third of them; the other four we have not seen published in English anywhere, including on the estate’s own English pages.

One number to put beside that table before you book anywhere else. GetYourGuide lists what looks like the same 90-minute tour, the Renaissance gardens, the hillside cellars and a tasting of the same estate wines with its oil and balsamic, at 62.75 dollars. The estate charges 36 euros for it. The reseller is a travel company registered in Australia, the listing carries no reviews and caps the group at six. We have not converted the currencies, because the rate moves and we would rather you compared the two published figures yourself.

36 euros at the gate, 55 with a coach: what the difference buys

The real decision here is not which tasting. It is whether you are getting yourself to Greve in Chianti.

Nineteen euros is the gap, and what it buys is the only part of the day you cannot arrange yourself: Greve in Chianti has no railway station. There is a bus, and our main Chianti guide covers which line it is and the catch that comes with it, which is that not one stop on the route is named after a winery.

So: if you have a car, book direct and pay 36. If you do not, the coach is not a rip-off, it is the transport.

Two things other guides mention and the estate does not. The road up is narrow and winding, which matters if you are driving a hire car you are not used to. And the visit is largely outdoors: US News puts the window at late spring to autumn, because in winter you spend most of it inside and the grounds turn muddy. Neither is our own observation and we mark both as reported rather than verified.

That half day is the one our main Chianti guide already recommends and prices, so we are not going to put the same booking button in front of you twice. Go and read it there.

Two of those deserve a second look. The 430 euro package is an odd and rather good idea: a private tour of the estate and a full lunch, bolted onto a guided visit to the Uffizi with a dedicated guide, over seven hours. Whether it is worth it depends entirely on what you would otherwise pay a private Uffizi guide, and we have not priced that comparison.

And the 48 euro apiary tour has nothing to do with wine at all. Two hours around the hives with a tasting of three honeys. It is the only thing of its kind we have come across on a Chianti estate.

The official tours page cannot sell you a tour

This is worth stating carefully, because it will send people away thinking the estate is closed or does not take bookings.

Search the estate’s name and the third result is its own page, Wine Tours Chianti. It loads fine. On it there is a booking widget and a button reading “Choose your experience and book now”. We checked where each one points, on 6 October 2026:

• The embedded booking widget loads /prenotazioni-visite-guidate/booking_1/, which returns 404.
• The “book now” button goes to booking_2/, which returns 404.
• The folder those two sit in returns 404 as well.
• The page still asks you to show a green pass or a negative covid test to enter the cellars, a requirement Italy dropped around four years ago.

The booking system that works is on a different address: book.verrazzano.com. The estate’s homepage links to it. The tours page does not.

None of this is a scandal. It is a farm, not a software company, and the site runs on a version of WordPress from 2017. But it does mean that the obvious route to booking a visit is a dead end, and that is useful to know before you give up and buy a more expensive coach tour instead.

Three departures a day is the real constraint

The Classic Wine Tour had three slots when we looked: 10:00, 15:00 and 16:00. The meals are fixed at 12:00, the Saturday dinner at 18:30, the apiary at 09:30.

Read that against a day from Florence and the shape of the problem appears. There is nothing between 10:00 and 12:00, and nothing after 16:00 unless you are staying for dinner. A late start from Florence means the 15:00 or the 16:00, and the 16:00 puts you back on the road in the dark for much of the year.

Availability also moves by date. Several of the six were showing as unavailable on the day we checked, which is ordinary for the Saturday dinner and the Sunday lunch, but it means the six-option menu above is a maximum rather than what you will find on your date.

What we have not checked

• We have not visited. Every figure here is the estate’s own published price and our own checking of its links. Nothing here reports what the tour is like.
• Whether the 55 euro day trip actually calls at Verrazzano. It is sold as a Greve in Chianti winery visit and does not name the estate, so we have put it here as a transport comparison and nothing more.
• Whether the 430 euro Uffizi package is good value, which would need the going rate for a private Uffizi guide, and we have not priced that.
• How you cover the last stretch from the bus stop, which our main Chianti guide also flags as unverified.
• Whether the broken booking links get fixed. We describe what each address returned on 6 October 2026. If you are reading this much later, check before you take our word for it.

Questions