Pieve di Santa Maria a Spaltenna site features

It is a Romanesque church, and the plan is a proper pieve's. Three naves closed by a single apse — the baptismal-church form, built to hold the population of a whole piviere rather than one village.

The stone is the subject. Its walls and its bell tower are built of filaretti of alberese — the local limestone split and squared into regular courses — of an ash-grey colour. That colour is worth knowing before you arrive: Spaltenna is not a golden Tuscan church.

The facade is austere to the point of bareness. It carries a single rectangular opening. There is no rose window, no sculpted portal and no decorative programme recorded.

It was fortified, and that is the thing to look for. The record calls the twelfth-century rebuilding a pieve munita; the bell tower and the wall faces are what carry that, and the church sits on its hill rather than in a village.

The farm alongside is part of the monument. The fattoria beside the pieve, with the monastic buildings, has been restructured — it is the same complex that was fought over as a benefice, and reading the two together is the point of coming.

A fortified parish church

The reason Spaltenna is interesting rather than merely old. When the pieve moved here between 1102 and 1110 it was rebuilt as a pieve munita — fortified. Castles in the Chianti are ordinary; a fortified baptismal church is a statement about a contested valley.

Three naves and one apse

The form of a pieve, not of a village church: three naves closed by a single apse, scaled to the population of the whole piviere that came here to be baptised.

Ash-grey alberese, laid in filaretto

The walls and the bell tower are filaretti di alberese of a cinerino — ash-grey — colour. Alberese is the hard limestone of these hills; squared into courses it gives the grey, close-jointed wall surface that is the signature of Chianti Romanesque.

One rectangular opening in the facade

That is the whole of the front. The austerity is characteristic, and it is what makes the bell tower the only vertical event in the composition.

A benefice worth fighting for

The fattoria and the monastic buildings attached to the pieve made it a beneficio that the richest families of the age tried to obtain. It went to the Ricasoli, who already held the lands and farm of the pieve di San Polo in Rosso — a reminder that in the medieval Chianti the churches were agricultural estates with altars in them.

The church it was named after is still standing, just

San Pietro in Avenano, two kilometres off, is called by the literature "the most significant example of Gothic religious architecture in the Chianti and perhaps in the whole Florentine contado". It has not been officiated for a long time and is in a state of enormous decay and abandonment.