Pieve di San Leolino

The Pieve di San Leolino stands as one of the most compelling and intellectually rich examples of Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture surviving in the Chianti region of Tuscany, occupying a commanding hilltop position in the locality of Panzano, a fraction of the comune of Greve in Chianti, within the province of Florence. As a pieve, or baptismal parish church, it fulfilled a pastoral and sacramental role that extended far beyond the immediate settlement, serving a wide network of dependent communities scattered across the undulating landscape of the Chianti hills. The diocesan affiliation of San Leolino has historically been to the diocese of Fiesole, a jurisdictional arrangement that tied this rural foundation to one of the most ancient episcopal sees in central Tuscany.

Its documented history stretches back to a parchment dated 982, preserved in the archive of the nearby Abbey of Passignano, wherein the church is referred to by the topographical designation San Leolino in Flacciano, suggesting that the place name reflects a pre-Romanesque micro-geography of the site. Yet this earliest written attestation by no means represents the foundation of the religious establishment; two sculptural fragments of considerable antiquity preserved within the church’s interior suggest an origin extending further back into the early medieval period, possibly as early as the eighth or ninth century. These fragments, one of which is a sandstone slab decorated with a low-relief cross interlaced with ribbon-work and spiral vortices, belong to the visual vocabulary of pre-Romanesque Christian decoration common throughout northern and central Italy in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian eras.

The identification of the saint to whom the church is dedicated, Leolinus, or Leo of Sens, reflects a hagiographic tradition that likely entered Tuscany through Frankish ecclesiastical networks, pointing to the broader cultural connections of the early medieval church in this region. During the high medieval period the pieve exercised spiritual authority over no fewer than fourteen suffragan churches, including the church within the walls of the castle of Panzano itself, a jurisdictional reach that testifies to its central importance in the ecclesiastical organization of the territory. The settlement at Panzano was itself of Roman origin, developing significantly during the post-Roman centuries and appearing in multiple documentary sources from the eleventh century onwards, confirming that the pieve existed within a landscape already shaped by centuries of human habitation and agricultural exploitation.

In 1508, following a long period of feudal and episcopal patronage, control over the pieve passed to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, a prestigious Florentine institution that subsequently oversaw significant architectural interventions and the commissioning of new devotional furnishings during the sixteenth century. From 1997 the complex has been home to the Comunità di San Leolino, a religious community whose presence has assured the continued liturgical use and careful custodianship of the building and its extraordinary artistic patrimony.

The geographical setting of the pieve is as much a part of its historical identity as its documents or its artworks, for the hilltop position from which it commands a sweeping panorama of the Panzano valley situates it within a centuries-old system of visual and symbolic topography characteristic of the rural churches of Chianti. The decision to place baptismal churches on elevated ground was both a practical measure for visibility and an expression of spiritual authority over the surrounding agricultural landscape, a pattern repeated across the pievi of Tuscany from the Romanesque period onwards.

The territory of Panzano formed part of the broader contested zone between the Florentine and Sienese spheres of influence, and the pieve’s accumulated artistic treasures reflect this position at the intersection of two great artistic traditions, absorbing influences from both the Florentine and Sienese schools across several centuries. The importance of the church as a devotional center is further attested by the miraculous status attributed to certain images housed within its walls, most notably the Madonna of Consolation, whose origins lay in a detached fresco from the Oratory of Sezzano and whose transfer to San Leolino in the early nineteenth century marked the culmination of a long history of popular veneration. The current architectural fabric of the pieve, while rooted in the building campaign of the twelfth century, underwent significant modifications in the sixteenth century that added an external portico and reshaped the building’s relationship to the surrounding hillside landscape.

A thoroughgoing restoration campaign undertaken in 1942 deliberately reversed many of these later accretions, seeking to restore the church to what was then interpreted as its authentic Romanesque character, a decision that reflected the broader ideological climate of that period and its associated theories of architectural authenticity. The interior space that visitors and scholars encounter today is therefore the product of multiple overlapping temporalities: an original Romanesque conception, successive medieval and early modern modifications, a nineteenth-century fresco restoration, and the twentieth-century campaign that sought to unify these strata within a single legible historical narrative.

The intellectual richness of the pieve as a subject of scholarly inquiry derives precisely from this layered complexity, which rewards close analysis from architectural history, art history, liturgical studies, and the history of conservation. San Leolino belongs to the distinguished group of Romanesque pievi scattered across the Chianti landscape, including those at Gaiole, Radda, and Greve, which together constitute one of the most concentrated survivals of early medieval rural ecclesiastical architecture in all of central Italy. As a repository of paintings, sculpture, glazed terracotta, and liturgical furnishings spanning more than a millennium, the pieve di San Leolino continues to constitute a primary site for the study of sacred art in medieval and early modern Tuscany.

Architecture and Spatial Organization

The architectural structure of the pieve di San Leolino belongs to the mature phase of Tuscan Romanesque ecclesiastical construction, its fabric datable to the twelfth century on the basis of both stylistic criteria and structural analysis. The ground plan follows the canonical three-aisled basilical scheme that characterizes the rural pievi of the region, with the central nave separated from the lateral aisles by quadrangular pillars constructed in roughly coursed alberese stone, a dense grey-white limestone quarried widely across the hills of the Chianti and the Valdarno. The nave terminates not in a semicircular apse of the kind common to many Romanesque churches of the area, but in a scarsella, a squared sanctuary space that gives the eastern end of the church an unusually rectilinear profile. The roof structure consists of wooden tie-beam trusses (capriate lignee) that span the central nave, a constructional solution that was both economical and technically appropriate to the modest proportions of a rural baptismal church in a region not endowed with the great stone-vaulting traditions of northern Italian Romanesque architecture. The exterior masonry, composed of carefully laid courses of alberese alternating in places with the darker pietra forte, exhibits the restrained dignity typical of Chianti Romanesque, entirely devoid of the figurative sculpture that enriches the facades of the great urban churches of Florence and Siena.

In the sixteenth century, the building’s appearance was significantly modified by the addition of a portico on the façade, its slender columns fashioned from pietra serena, the fine-grained grey sandstone quarried near Fiesole and used extensively in Florentine Renaissance architecture, lending a note of classical elegance to what had been a purely Romanesque exterior. The bell tower, whose lower courses preserve the original Romanesque masonry, represents a further element of the building’s medieval stratigraphic complexity and has been the subject of intermittent scholarly attention in discussions of Chianti campanile typology. The interior spatial organization, with its three aisles and clearly defined sanctuary, would have provided the essential framework for the liturgical choreography of the medieval pieve, supporting processions, baptismal rites performed at the font situated near the entrance, and the display of the altarpieces and sacred images that constituted the primary devotional apparatus of the community.

The restoration of 1942 stripped away the accumulated surface modifications of later centuries, removing nineteenth-century paint schemes and interventions to reveal the bare stone masonry and timber roof in a condition that was interpreted as historically authoritative, though this interpretation has subsequently been subjected to critical scrutiny by conservation scholars. The spatial experience of San Leolino today, with its cool stone interior bathed in the subdued light filtering through small windows, retains an atmosphere of austere medieval devotion that was deliberately cultivated by the twentieth-century restoration and that forms an appropriate context for the contemplation of the great paintings and sculptural works preserved within.

Materials and Techniques

The material culture of the pieve di San Leolino spans more than a millennium of craft tradition and encompasses a remarkable diversity of media, from the carved stone of the early medieval period to the glazed and painted terracotta of the High Renaissance, each medium reflecting the technical capabilities and aesthetic priorities of its respective historical moment. The earliest surviving object in the church, the pre-Romanesque sandstone slab decorated with a low-relief cross with ribbon interlace and vortex ornament, was executed in the opus interrasile or relief-carving technique characteristic of the Lombard and Carolingian decorative tradition, in which the background is excavated to leave the design in slight relief against a recessed ground.

The primary building material of the church itself, the alberese limestone used for the wall construction and the quadrangular nave pillars, is a rock type that weathers to a warm grey-white tone under the Tuscan climate, developing a characteristic surface patina that integrates harmoniously with the surrounding landscape and gives the building its sense of belonging to the hillside from which its stones were quarried. The pietra serena used for the sixteenth-century portico columns belongs to a quite different material tradition, being associated with the refined architectural workshop culture of Florentine pietra forte and serena carving that reached its fullest expression in the Renaissance architecture of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and their successors.

The panel paintings preserved in the interior were executed on wooden supports, typically poplar for Florentine works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, prepared with a ground of gesso sottile (finely ground calcium sulphate) bound with animal-skin glue, applied in multiple thin layers and carefully smoothed before the application of underdrawing and paint. Pigments used by the painters of the pieve’s altarpieces would have included lapis lazuli blue, vermilion, lead white, ochres of various tones, malachite and azurite for greens and blues, and the costly ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan via Venetian trade networks, all bound in egg tempera, the dominant binding medium of Italian panel painting until the widespread adoption of oil in the late fifteenth century.

Gold leaf, applied to the prepared ground over a base of bolo armeno (red clay), was employed for the backgrounds of thirteenth and fourteenth-century panels and for the haloes of sacred figures, creating the luminous, dematerialized golden fields that signified the transcendent light of the divine in the visual theology of medieval Christian art. The glazed terracotta works attributed to the workshop of Giovanni della Robbia, dating from around 1520, were produced using the maiolica technique in which the modelled terracotta surface, once fired, was coated with a lead and tin glaze and painted with metallic oxide pigments before a second firing at lower temperature, producing the characteristic brilliant white surfaces, cobalt blues, and viridian greens of the Robbian aesthetic.

The detached fresco of the Madonna Lactans attributed to Bicci di Lorenzo, originally painted in the Oratory of Sezzano in the early fifteenth century, was executed using the buon fresco technique in which pigments mixed with water are applied directly to freshly laid lime plaster, bonding chemically with the calcium carbonate as it carbonates, creating an image that is literally embedded within the wall surface.

The preparatory drawing (sinopia) executed in red ochre on the rough arriccio plaster beneath the finish coat, visible in the sinopia of the late fourteenth-century fresco now at San Leolino, reveals the compositional thinking of the artist and preserves evidence of the workshop practice through which such large-scale pictorial projects were organized and executed. The baptismal font produced by the Buglioni workshop in the early sixteenth century was executed in glazed terracotta decorated with the Stories of St. John the Baptist, representing a continuation and popularization of the Robbian technique in a period when the demand for affordable yet visually splendid liturgical furnishings in rural parishes across Tuscany was at its height.

Artists and Their Background

The artistic patrimony assembled at the pieve di San Leolino over the course of seven centuries is the collective achievement of painters, sculptors, and craftsmen whose careers and training are representative of the major artistic tendencies of medieval and early modern Tuscany, from the Byzantine-inflected maniera greca of the Duecento to the Late Gothic refinement of the Trecento and the Renaissance innovations of the early Quattrocento. The most historically significant of the artists connected with San Leolino is Meliore di Jacopo, a Florentine painter active in the second half of the thirteenth century and one of the very few Italian painters of the Duecento who can be identified with certainty through signed works and contemporary documentary references. Born in Florence between approximately 1230 and 1240, Meliore is documented among the Florentine citizens who participated in the Battle of Montaperti in 1260, where he is listed as Migliore dipintore of the parish of San Giacomo tra le fosse, a reference that confirms his standing as one of the most highly regarded painters active in the city at that date.

His principal surviving signed work, the dossale now in the Uffizi dated 1271 and depicting the Redeemer between the Virgin and Three Saints, establishes a secure stylistic point of reference for the attribution of other works, including the thirteenth-century dossale at San Leolino representing the Madonna Enthroned between Saints Peter and Paul with Stories of Their Lives. Meliore’s style is deeply rooted in the Byzantine pictorial tradition as it was assimilated by Florentine painters through direct contact with Greek and Greek-trained artists and through the great mosaic campaigns of the Florentine Baptistery, in which Meliore himself is believed to have participated during the execution of the Last Judgment cycle between approximately 1260 and 1275. His figures display the characteristic features of the maniera greca, elongated proportions, stylized drapery with gold highlights (chrysography), large almond-shaped eyes, and the frontal hieratic postures inherited from Byzantine icon painting, while at the same time showing the beginnings of a concern for volume and emotional expressiveness that would be developed more radically by his near-contemporary Cimabue.

The attribution of the San Leolino dossale to Meliore has been upheld by successive generations of art historians, though certain scholars have proposed the involvement of his workshop or of a close follower whose style was deeply influenced by the master’s distinctive vocabulary.

Mariotto di Nardo, whose polyptych occupies the high altar of the pieve, was a Florentine painter documented between approximately 1380 and 1424, trained in the tradition of the late Trecento Florentine workshop system and active during the transitional period between the International Gothic style and the early Renaissance innovations of Masaccio and his circle. His polyptych for San Leolino, dated to 1421 and depicting the Madonna Enthroned with Child and Two Angels flanked by saints including Francis, John the Baptist, Euphrosinius, and Lawrence, represents a sophisticated synthesis of Florentine and International Gothic tendencies, with refined drapery patterns and an attentiveness to spatial organization that situates it at the culmination of the late Gothic altarpiece tradition in Florence. Mariotto’s career, which included a prestigious commission from Pandolfo Malatesta at Pesaro in 1400, obtained through the direct recommendation of the Florentine government, confirms his reputation as a painter of the first rank whose work extended far beyond the local Florentine market.

The painter who executed the triptych representing the Madonna and Child Espoused to Saint Catherine of Alexandria between Saints Peter and Paul is known only by the conventional name of the Maestro di Panzano, or Master of the Panzano Triptych, deriving his notional identity from this very work in the pieve. Bernard Berenson, the most influential connoisseur of Italian painting in the early twentieth century, attributed this triptych to a painter of the late fourteenth century whom he characterized as stylistically close to Barna da Siena and Bartolo di Fredi, situating the artist within the Sienese pictorial orbit rather than the Florentine tradition. Barna da Siena, with whom the Maestro di Panzano has been associated, is himself a figure of considerable scholarly controversy: mentioned by Lorenzo Ghiberti in his Commentarii of around 1450 as a Sienese painter of great skill who worked at Florence, San Gimignano, and Cortona, he is identified in documentary sources of 1340 as Barna Bertini dipentore of the parish of Santo Pellegrino in Siena, and is said to have died after falling from scaffolding while executing a fresco cycle at San Gimignano.

Religious Art and Church Furnishings

The interior of the pieve di San Leolino constitutes, in effect, a compressed anthology of sacred art spanning the period from the early medieval centuries to the early sixteenth century, assembled through a combination of original commissions, later donations, and the deliberate transfer of works from other religious sites whose closure or reduced status made their safe custody uncertain. The oldest object in this collection, predating the current Romanesque fabric of the church, is the sandstone slab now used as the support for the altar table, decorated with the low-relief cross and ribbon interlace described above, which scholars have dated to the eighth or ninth century and interpreted as a pluteo, or chancel screen panel, from an earlier ecclesiastical structure on the same or a nearby site.

The dossale attributed to Meliore di Jacopo, representing the Madonna Enthroned between Saints Peter and Paul with Scenes from Their Lives, is arranged according to the narrative format typical of the Duecento dossale tradition, in which a central devotional image is flanked by lateral compartments containing small scenes from the hagiographic narratives of the flanking saints, creating a compressed visual compendium of sacred biography arranged around the central Marian image. The polyptych by Mariotto di Nardo at the high altar presents the elaborated compartmentalized format of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento altarpiece, with the central image of the enthroned Madonna and Child flanked by lateral panels depicting individual saintly figures, a format that evolved to serve both the devotional requirements of the main altar and the liturgical needs of the individual chapels and guilds that often co-patronized the various compartments of such complex altarpieces.

The triptych attributed to the Maestro di Panzano, depicting the Madonna and Child Espoused to Saint Catherine between Saints Peter and Paul, introduces an unusual iconographic motif, the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, that reflects the growing importance of Catherine of Alexandria as a devotional figure in late fourteenth-century Tuscany, where her cult was energetically promoted by the contemporaneous activity of Saint Catherine of Siena. Two glazed terracotta tabernacles attributed to the workshop of Giovanni della Robbia, datable to around 1520, were in all probability commissioned by Leonardo Buonafede, the spedalingo (chief administrator) of Santa Maria Nuova, as part of the new campaign of furnishing and embellishment that followed the transfer of patronage from secular lords to the hospital in 1508, with the Buonafede stemma (coat of arms) apparently preserved on one of the works as evidence of his personal patronage. The fresco of the Baptism of Christ attributed to Raffaellino del Garbo, housed in the baptismal chapel, represents the pieve’s only work by a painter trained directly in the Florentine High Renaissance tradition, though the work’s current appearance has been significantly compromised by repainting carried out in the nineteenth century, making a precise assessment of the original pictorial quality difficult.

The glazed terracotta baptismal font decorated with six scenes from the Stories of St. John the Baptist, produced by the Buglioni workshop expressly for San Leolino in the early sixteenth century, is one of the most significant objects in the church from a liturgical standpoint, as it represents the material focus of the pieve’s primary sacramental function, the rite of baptism through which generations of inhabitants of the surrounding territory were received into the Christian community.

Illuminated Manuscripts and Pictorial Arts

While the pieve di San Leolino is not known to have served as a scriptorium or monastic production center for illuminated manuscripts in the way that larger ecclesiastical institutions such as the Abbey of Passignano or the Florentine Camaldolese communities did, the church’s situation within a densely networked ecclesiastical landscape that included such centers means that any consideration of its pictorial culture must engage with the broader context of manuscript production and pictorial art in the medieval Chianti and Valdarno regions.

The panel paintings preserved at San Leolino are deeply connected to the pictorial conventions developed and transmitted through the manuscript illumination tradition, which provided the primary vehicle for the diffusion of Byzantine pictorial models into central Italian painting during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Florentine painters such as Meliore di Jacopo were developing their distinctive synthesis of Greek and Latin visual traditions.

The chrysography technique visible in the gold-highlighted drapery of the figures in the San Leolino dossale, thin lines of gold used to suggest the fall of light across fabric surfaces, derives directly from Byzantine manuscript illumination practice, transmitted to Italian panel painting through the intermediary of Greek-trained craftsmen working in the scriptorium and panel-painting workshops of central and southern Italy in the twelfth century.

The relationship between the devotional panel painting displayed on altars and the illuminated liturgical books placed upon them for the celebration of the Mass was one of profound visual and theological coherence in the medieval church: the gold-ground panels, the jewel-like pigments, and the frontal presentation of sacred figures in both media shared a common aesthetic vocabulary rooted in the theology of sacred image as epiphany, the visible manifestation of invisible divine realities.

The late fourteenth-century fresco, of unknown provenance, that depicts an unusual musical scene with figures playing instruments including, in the sinopia, a flute, demonstrates the range of iconographic programs that could enter even a rural pieve through mechanisms of artistic mobility and the transfer of works between religious establishments. The Florentine pictorial tradition represented in the church by the works of Meliore di Jacopo and Mariotto di Nardo was sustained in part by the close relationship between the manuscript illumination workshops and the panel painting ateliers of the city, with artists frequently working across both media and transmitting technical knowledge and compositional formulae between painted books and altar panels.

External Influences

The artistic culture visible at the pieve di San Leolino is the product of multiple intersecting currents of influence, reflecting the church’s position at the crossroads between the Florentine and Sienese artistic spheres in the contested territory of the Chianti, a geographical situation that enriched its visual culture with a diversity unavailable to establishments more firmly within a single regional tradition. The Byzantine influence on the earliest panel paintings in the church is the most historically consequential of these external currents, since it was through the assimilation of Greek pictorial conventions that central Italian painting acquired the formal grammar, the gold backgrounds, the hieratic frontality, the chrysographic drapery, that would serve as the foundation for the innovations of Cimabue, Duccio, and ultimately Giotto.

The role of Constantinople and its artistic diaspora in transmitting Byzantine pictorial models to Italian workshops cannot be overstated: the presence of Greek mosaicists and painters in Rome, Venice, Sicily, and Florence from the eleventh century onwards created a series of direct contact points through which the formal language of Byzantine icon painting entered the bloodstream of Italian religious art. The attribution of the principal triptych of San Leolino to a painter associated with the Sienese tradition, specifically with the circles of Barna da Siena and Bartolo di Fredi, introduces Sienese stylistic elements into a church that stands within the Florentine diocesan world, testifying to the fluid movement of artists and artistic models across the political boundary between the two great rival city-states.

The Sienese contribution to the art of the pieve is not merely stylistic but also iconographic, since the Sienese painters of the Trecento developed and popularized a number of devotional iconographic types, including the Madonna of Humility, the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, and various narrative programs from the lives of the saints, that exercised a pervasive influence on the pictorial production of the entire region. The Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, which assumed patronage of the pieve in 1508, introduced a new current of Florentine Renaissance influence into the church through its commissioning activities, sponsoring the Robbian terracotta tabernacles and almost certainly shaping the broader aesthetic program of the sixteenth-century furnishings in accordance with Florentine humanist taste. The transfer of the miraculous fresco of the Madonna of Consolation from the Oratory of Sezzano to Vallombrosa in 1797 and its subsequent movement to San Leolino in 1811 illustrates a broader pattern of artistic displacement characteristic of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, when the suppression of religious houses across central Italy set in motion an unprecedented redistribution of sacred images and liturgical objects across the Tuscan landscape.

Preservation and Conservation

The conservation history of the pieve di San Leolino is a narrative of multiple interventions, each reflecting the dominant theories and institutional frameworks of its respective period, from the episodic restorations of the post-medieval centuries to the systematic scientific approaches of the late twentieth century. The earliest restoration activities were likely motivated primarily by structural necessity rather than any articulated theoretical framework, addressing the degradation of the fabric in an empirical and pragmatic manner consonant with pre-modern building maintenance practice, and the sixteenth-century addition of the portico and other architectural modifications should be understood partly in this context of ongoing fabric management.

The restoration of 1942 represents the most historically consequential conservation intervention the building has received, not only because of the extent of its physical interventions, the removal of later surface finishes and the restoration of the Romanesque masonry, but also because of the theoretical assumptions embedded in its methodology, specifically the idea that a building could be returned to an authentic original state by stripping away subsequent accretions. This approach, associated with the influence of Camillo Boito’s principles of restauro scientifico as they were interpreted in the Italian practice of the early twentieth century, has been subjected to searching criticism by later conservation theorists who have emphasized the irreversible loss of historical information involved in the removal of later strata, regardless of their aesthetic or historical interest.

The panel paintings preserved within the pieve have received individual conservation attention at various points in the twentieth century; the dossale attributable to Meliore di Jacopo, in particular, has been the subject of restoration work at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, one of the world’s leading centres for the conservation of panel paintings and polychrome surfaces, which used both traditional craft techniques and modern scientific analysis in its treatment. The application of scientific analytical methods to the study and conservation of Tuscan medieval panel paintings has expanded dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, with techniques including X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, infrared reflectography, and cross-section analysis of paint layers enabling conservators to characterize the original materials of a work, map later interventions, and design treatment strategies sensitive to the complex stratigraphic history of the painted surface.

The fresco of the Baptism of Christ attributed to Raffaellino del Garbo suffered significantly from the repainting campaign of the nineteenth century, and its current condition illustrates the irreversible damage that can be caused by restoration interventions undertaken without adequate technical knowledge of the original medium and without the guiding principle of minimum intervention that governs modern conservation practice. The detached fresco of the Madonna of Consolation underwent a conservation treatment by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure following its recovery in 1980, after a period in which it had been removed from its location in connection with the Madonna fiorentina and Panzano, a treatment that addressed both the structural stability of the detached plaster support and the surface condition of the painted layer. The glazed terracotta works attributed to the Robbian workshops present specific conservation challenges arising from the porosity of the terracotta body, the susceptibility of the lead-tin glaze to chemical degradation in humid environments, and the fragility of the polychrome enamel surface, all of which require careful environmental management and periodic condition monitoring to prevent further deterioration.

The management of the pieve’s artistic heritage in the contemporary period is complicated by the building’s continued liturgical function, since the requirements of active worship, humidity from human breath and candle smoke, the movement of heavy objects, and the need for artificial lighting, can be in tension with the optimal physical conditions for the preservation of historic artworks. The Comunità di San Leolino, which has inhabited and managed the complex since 1997, plays a crucial role in this ongoing negotiation between liturgical vitality and heritage preservation, maintaining the building’s status as a living sacred space while working within the framework of Italian heritage law and the oversight of the Soprintendenza to safeguard the extraordinary collection entrusted to its care. The broader challenge of preserving the rural pievi of Chianti, many of which face problems of structural decay, inadequate funding, and diminished populations in their catchment communities, makes the relatively well-maintained condition of San Leolino an example of what can be achieved through the combination of active religious occupation, engaged scholarly attention, and the institutional support of the heritage protection system.