Florence Airport, Peretola

Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR), officially Amerigo Vespucci Airport, is Tuscany's international city airport and one of Europe's most famous short-runway operations. Located in the Peretola neighbourhood just 4 km (2.5 mi) north-west of Florence's historic centre, the airport sits at an elevation of 142 ft (43 m) between the Apennines and the Monte Morello massif. Its single asphalt runway 05/23 of 5,118 ft (1,560 m) is one of the shortest among Europe's top-60 airports, permitting only narrowbodies such as the Airbus A220, A320 and Embraer E-190 series, and requiring specialised crew certification owing to challenging crosswinds and a curving arrival path over the Arno valley. Despite the length limits, FLR serves 54 routes to 44 destinations on 28 airlines (2026), making it unusually dense in network terms for a regional airport. Scheduled operators include Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, ITA Airways, Vueling, Iberia and Swiss, with the primary traffic flow feeding European hubs (Paris-CDG, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid, Zurich) rather than long-haul service. The airport is operated by Toscana Aeroporti, which also runs Pisa's larger Galileo Galilei Airport, and the two are marketed as the combined Tuscan airport system. A long-planned new terminal and a re-oriented 12/30 runway of approximately 7,545 ft (2,300 m) received final Italian government approval in 2023, with completion targeted for the early 2030s; the project is controversial but is seen as essential to lifting Florence's share of Italy's inbound tourism market beyond Rome, Milan and Venice. FLR is named after Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose voyages gave the American continents their name, and the airport retains a distinctive small-airport feel: the 1990s terminal handles a pre-pandemic peak of roughly 3 million passengers per year in a footprint of less than 20,000 sqm (215,000 sqft). The airport's positioning is unusual in that its main client base - leisure travellers bound for the Uffizi, Chianti and San Gimignano - often arrives via Pisa or Bologna even when Florence non-stops are available.