Chiesa di San Francesco a Bonistallo

Above Poggio a Caiano, on the hill of Bonistallo, the parish church of San Francesco began life in 1600 as the oratory of a lay confraternity. It took over an older parish's treasures, and with them a hill entwined with the deaths of Francesco I de' Medici and Bianca Cappello.

Why it matters

The hill of Bonistallo preserves an older layer of religious history than the Medici villa below. A chapel here is documented from the first half of the thirteenth century, dependent on the pieve of Carmignano, and the medieval parish church of Santa Maria Assunta kept its role until the population moved down to the plain. When the parish returned to the hill in 1922, it settled in the modest oratory of the Confraternity of the Holy Stigmata — recorded from 1600 and described by the diocese as an eighteenth-century building — which became the church of San Francesco d'Assisi. The result is a small church with a deep memory: paintings rescued from the old parish, close ties to the grand-ducal court next door, and a terrace that overlooks the whole Ombrone plain.

What to notice

The church sits on a raised terrace, fronted by a nineteenth-century portico whose stone slabs carry a scatter of old inscriptions — fragments of the hill's written past. The interior is a single nave covered by a lowered barrel vault, with stucco reliefs set in slender frames above the four side doors, an eighteenth-century scheme that has never been redecorated away. The paintings reward slow looking: a Christ Blessing with Saints Francis and Lawrence by the friar-painter Felice da Sambuca, and a Madonna of the Rosary with Saints Dominic and Catherine painted in 1623 by Matteo Rosselli, one of the most fluent Florentine painters of his generation. Behind the high altar hangs a modern canvas of Saint Francis in prayer, painted in 1986 by Francesco Inverni, showing that the church's decoration is still a living sequence rather than a museum array.

Context and history

The medieval story belongs to the old church of Santa Maria Assunta nearby, cited from the thirteenth century under the name capella S. Marie de Bonostallo and recorded in the papal tithe lists of 1250 and 1374. Dante's readers know the hill for a scandal: in 1295 the brigand Vanni Fucci, later numbered among the thieves in the Inferno, robbed its sacristy. After the parish seat moved to the new church in Poggio a Caiano, consecrated in 1903, the hilltop church was suppressed, sold off and divided into dwellings. The return came in 1922, when the bishop of Pistoia erected a new parish of San Francesco d'Assisi on the hill — an idea the diocese traces back a century earlier — thanks to the donation of the old parish buildings by Corinna Landini, with the confraternity oratory as its seat. The grand dukes had always kept an eye on the hill because of their villa below, and parish chronicles record that the viscera of Francesco I and Bianca Cappello, both of whom died at the villa in October 1587, were buried in the old church — a burial the recent restoration campaigns investigated, finding an urn in the small ossuary chapel.