Pieve di Santa Maria a Spaltenna
Pieve di Santa Maria a Spaltenna historical timeline
Last updated on November 3, 2026The story begins with another church. San Pietro in Avenano appears for the first time as a pieve in a document of the abbey of Coltibuono of 995, when — according to Emanuele Repetti — it was united with the pieve of Spaltenna.
Spaltenna itself is recorded from 1030, in parchments of the badia di Coltibuono.
Between 1102 and 1110 the pieve moved up here. The pieve of San Pietro in Avenano was transferred to Spaltenna, took the name of Santa Maria a Spaltenna, and was transformed into a pieve munita — fortified. The old church kept its own name until 1153, when in the bull of Anastasius IV to the bishop of Fiesole the pope cited it as pieve di Santa Maria a Spaltenna.
By the end of the thirteenth century the hierarchy had settled. The two churches then appear as distinct units in a well-established relationship: San Pietro is cited as a canonica — the seat of a community of secular priests — set within the piviere of Spaltenna. The mother church had become the daughter.
What made Spaltenna valuable was not the altar. The fattoria with the monastic buildings, the kind of property many churches held, was a beneficio that the richest families of the period sought to obtain. Santa Maria a Spaltenna became the property of the Ricasoli, who were already the owners of the lands and the farm of the pieve di San Polo in Rosso.
San Pietro in Avenano had been Ricasoli too — a very ancient patronage of that family — and it is where the family's arms appear, in glazed terracotta, on an arch in the scarsella.
Avenano's end is the counterweight to Spaltenna's survival. No longer officiated for a long time, it stands in a condition of enormous decay and abandonment, which only careful restoration and revaluation could interrupt. Its facade carries a Romanesque scheme restored in 1832; its interior was wholly redefined in the early twentieth century, when it was plastered over and painted a drab greyish tone that hid the beauty of the original stone in the piers and vaults.
Verified against Wikipedia, October 2026.