A Florence website: two languages, one set of prices

A Florence business website has to work in two languages, because some of the people who book or buy do not read Italian. With 360,930 residents in 2023, the lowest figure among the five cities in this series, the site audience is not the residents: it is whoever is passing through, and whoever is passing through is often not Italian.

The figure is for the municipality of Florence, read from Wikidata on 1 November 2026, with the Città metropolitana di Firenze as the province and Tuscany as the region. It is not a visitor figure: it is the figure that shows how small the local base is and how much a business depends on demand from outside.

The audience does not match the residents

With a local base of 360,930 people, a business that lives on visitors has a market larger than the city and also more demanding: someone arriving from outside does not know the neighbourhood, has no Italian number and decides in minutes. The site has to answer different questions: where you are relative to routes they already know, what must be booked in advance, how to pay, what happens if they arrive late.

What to translate and what to leave alone

Translating everything costs as much as rebuilding the site, and it is unnecessary. The rule is to translate what a person uses to decide and to arrive; leave in Italian whatever concerns Italian law, with an English note that explains it.

Two languages mean two maintenance jobs

A second language is not a switch: it is a copy of the site that has to stay current. Every time you change a time, a price or a photo, the edit happens twice; do it once and the two versions say different things, so the client picks whichever suits them, and the trust damage is beyond what design can fix.

• Separate URLs per language: /en/ rather than a parameter, with hreflang declared in both directions.
• No automatic redirect by browser language: someone reading Italian on an English phone must be able to stay.
• Copy written in the target language: word-for-word translation shows in the first sentence.
• One price list, used by both versions: if the figures diverge, the problem is not translation.

What changes for a business under ten people

Under ten people the constraint is not budget, it is the time of whoever updates the site. The consequence is an order of work: the pages that bring a booking or a sale first, in both languages; the rest afterwards, even in Italian only. Six complete double pages work better than twenty pages where the English stops at the home page.

The cost: national ranges, not Florentine ones

A 5-10 page showcase site in Italy sits between €1,500 and €4,000; a structured company site between €4,000 and €10,000. Those are national ranges, published as such: our dataset holds no per-city prices. A second language adds content, not code: it doubles the copy and the review, so it hits the budget line that almost no quote lists.

Three records worth opening

Footer 01 from Shadcn Space is where address, hours and the language switcher live: if it is muddled, the client never finds the English version. Hero 03 from Shadcn UI Blocks leaves room for a short headline and a booking button, and the header category holds 18 blocks from 4 publishers for the top bar. The licence is declared by the publisher and needs checking on the block; previews are free, the full code sits in the Pro plan.

The limitation to state up front

The catalogue holds React and Tailwind components, not a translation management system: no block generates hreflang, syncs two versions or flags an Italian page with no English counterpart. That part has to be built or configured outside the catalogue, and checked on every publish.

# la versione inglese esiste e dichiara hreflang?
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/en/ | grep -o 'hreflang="[^"]*"'

# quante pagine inglesi sono indicizzate
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/sitemap.xml | grep -c "/en/"

# i prezzi sono identici nelle due versioni?
curl -s https://www.esempio.it/en/prenota | grep -oE '[0-9]+ ?(€|EUR)' | head -5

To choose the technical base read how to choose a template, for the budget what a website costs; the platform comparison is in WordPress, Wix or React components.