I am assuming if you come to Tel Aviv, you will either hear about Florentin upon arriving or find yourself there accidentally or not. It's considered the hipster part of the city, and very much encapsulates a specific downtown urban feel.
If you're a young person coming here, Florentin is one of the neighborhoods I'd recommend staying in or looking further into! It's also home to a lot of the city's famous graffiti (although there is street art and graffiti all over the city, most graffiti tours concentrate in Florentin)!
And a few other things to note as well..
⭐️ While not entirely different from the rest of Tel Aviv, Florentin specifically is known for it's grit. It was a poor, industrial neighborhood for decades and has only gotten its more recent youthful, artsy reputation in the past 20 years or so.
⭐️ With that being said, like most relatively recently gentrified neighborhoods, there are a fair amount of streets and blocks within the neighborhood you probably wouldn't want to stay on. That doesn't make them unsafe necessarily (safety at large is a very different concept in Israel than in most of the Western world). But take this as an advisory, especially if looking to book accommodations, that one street can look vastly different from the next one a block over.
⭐️ Population-wise, there are still a lot of locals and immigrants alongside the young people. Its main inhabitants are Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and North Africa; most of whom run factories and work in the garment trading business. Levinsky Market is a great place to see a lot of these people showcasing their culture and culinary contributions, but they are visible all over the neighborhood if you keep your eyes open past the hipsters. I personally think this makes Florentin what it is, since most parts of Tel Aviv are far too expensive now for any low-earning immigrant to still live in.
