Chiesa di San Pietro in Jerusalem

In the hamlet of San Gersolè, among the olive terraces near Impruneta, the parish church of San Pietro in Jerusalem carries one of the oldest written records in the Chiantigian hills. Its medieval stones and nearby school history document the area's rural past.

Why it matters

This is the parish church of the village whose name it still carries in common speech, and its documentation reaches back to a papal bull of Pope Adrian IV dated 29 November 1156, in which the church appears among the properties then confirmed; a document of 1204 names it as the "eclessia de S. Irsoleo", a dependency of the Vallombrosan monks. Few rural churches in the Florentine hills can show such an early paper trail. It remains a parish of the Archdiocese of Florence, serving a scattered hillside community, and stands beside the village associated with schoolteacher Maria Maltoni's twentieth-century teaching experiments.

What to notice

Traces of the original medieval building survive in the facade and along the southern flank, where older masonry contrasts with later work; a cloister once ran along the north side. Inside, the space is a single nave roofed with open wooden trusses, a plain and honest structure typical of country pievi. On the walls hang a seventeenth-century canvas of the Madonna with Child and a panel of the same period depicting the Miracle of Saint Peter, which echoes the church's unusual dedication to Saint Peter in Jerusalem. The churchyard and nearby road overlook the Ema valley toward Florence. The former schoolhouse and Maltoni's grave also record the village's educational history.

Context and history

The dedication is the church's first puzzle and its signature: a Peter in Jerusalem rather than the usual local saints, preserved through the medieval documents alongside the village name that later softened into San Gersolè. Under the Vallombrosans the church anchored a rural parish in a landscape of vineyards and olive groves, an agricultural world that lasted into the twentieth century. Its most celebrated chapter belongs to education: from 1920 to 1956 the elementary teacher Maria Maltoni turned the village school into one of the most discussed pedagogical experiments in Italy, built on children's diaries and drawings. Former pupils buried her in the cemetery near the church, and her grave was restored in 2014, fifty years after her death, with their contributions; the old school building nearby bears a stone commemorative plaque.