Florence's Amerigo Vespucci closed 2025 at a record 3.85 million passengers (+9.4%), 87% international — inside a Tuscan system pushing ten million — while a new terminal and a rotated runway target 5.9 million by 2035.
FLR's 2025: 3,853,000 passengers (+9.4%) — the best year on record, 34% above the 2019 peak of 2.87 million. International traffic carried it: 3.35 million (+12.2%), 87.2% of the total, while domestic slipped 6.4% to ~490,000. Top routes: Paris, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Munich. May–September all ran near 390,000 a month; 7 September set the single-day record above 15,100.
The system context: Toscana Aeroporti — the company running Florence and Pisa — closed 2025 at a record 9.8 million passengers (+8.4%), with Pisa's Galileo Galilei posting its own best year at ~6.0 million (+7.8%). Tuscany's air gateway is now a two-airport machine approaching ten million.
The expansion: a new ~50,000 m² terminal organised around a central piazza plus the headline engineering move — rotating the runway 90° away from the hills that constrain it — lifting design capacity from 3.4 million toward 5.9 million passengers a year by 2035, with arrivals and departures integrated with tram, parking and retail.
FLR is a city airport in the purest sense — ten minutes by tram from the Duomo, a single short runway, business-and-culture traffic at 87% international — and its constraint is geometry: the runway points at hills, which caps aircraft size and weather resilience. The fix is radical: rotate the runway 90 degrees away from the hills and build a 50,000 m² terminal, targeting 5.9 million passengers by 2035 against today's 3.4 million design ceiling. Practically until then: fly FLR for Paris, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Munich and the Rome feeder — tram T2 reaches Santa Maria Novella in ~20 minutes for €1.70; for long-haul or low-cost breadth, Pisa (record ~6M, 1h by train) and Bologna (40 min by Frecciarossa) are the working alternatives. The watch item is the expansion's politics: rotating a runway in Tuscany is a decade-scale environmental negotiation, and every record year strengthens the case.
Subscribe to the digest and receive key market signals every two weeks.