Pieve a Ripoli, the story of one of the oldest churches in Italy among miracles and wonders

37

The church of San Pietro a Ripoli is one of the oldest in Italy. In a Charlemagne document from 774 it is remembered as the Quarte Plebe Sancti Petri, namely a church located on the fourth mile of the Adrianea Cassia consular road, an axis of fundamental transit for trade, postal, military and religious flows.

It was built using many stones retrieved from the nearby Roman settlement of Bagno a Ripoli and even today in the cloister numerous Roman remains are preserved (bases of columns, capitals, urns and gravestones) found in the surrounding farms.

An elegant portico supported by two octagonal columns upon which stood statues of St. Peter and St. Paul – now kept inside – goes into the church where you can admire many works of art: coats of arms in stone, a precious baptismal font of Roman origin, a fresco of St. John the Baptist, the Passion attributed to Spinello Aretino, a sixteenth-century wooden sculpture with the dead Christ, a crucifix attributed to Taddeo Gaddi, a painting from 1350 by the Giotto school and a table with Jesus on the Cross, likely made by Andrea del Sarto.

In 1400 the adjacent oratory of the church was built where the ancient Society of the Holy Cross met of which the Grand Duke Cosimo III, the archbishop and a large group of Counts, Marquis, and Baronesses were part in order to carry out works of charity and organize processions and pilgrimages. Under the crucifix – known as the Good Death – the Congregazione degli Agonizzanti (Congregation of the Agonizers) met to pray to God to grant a good death for the suffering.

Some miracles were attributed to the Holy Cross for events that took place in the pilgrimage to Loreto in 1773, during the plague in Pian di Ripoli in 1781 and for having made the rain come in 1861 after a long drought.

But the first miracle happened on March 3rd, 1626 when the crucifix was stolen “and was miraculously found by the farmer Giuliano Casini, known as the Poor Man, in a field facing the Parish, in the woods.”

In the early twentieth century, in the meadow in front of the Parish there was still a giant elm tree under which the common people gathered to listen to public announcements of the City, to discuss and also to announce the loss or theft of an animal. Therefore, a common place to participate in public gatherings, religious and private.

 

 

SHARE
La redazione del giornale eChianti.it