The Pieve di Santa Maria Assunta and the Pieve Vecchia di Piteglio

The Marian cult between faith and legend
Art and Culture Historical buildings Artistic elements Places of worship
Via Del Campanile, Piteglio (San Marcello Piteglio)
Via Del Campanile, Piteglio (San Marcello Piteglio) (Enlarge the map)

Piteglio, a mystical place on the slopes of the Val di Lima, tells of legends, art, and faith from his access doors to the top of its bell tower.
A story that begins along the ancient medieval track where the Pieve Vecchia, just outside the town, welcomes visitors. The Pieve is a small Romanesque jewel abandoned between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in favor of the more central castle church: erected in the 11th century with the name of Pieve di Santa Maria, it was later renamed Santissima Annunziata. Its archaic birth establishes it as the oldest building of worship in all the Pistoia mountains, since the parish church of Lizzano (10th century) was destroyed by a terrible landslide in 1814. Despite the passage of time, its face did not change much, with the exception of the peculiar external pulpit leaning against its façade – once indispensable to perform the archaic rite of blessing of the valley with the precious relic of the Milk of Our Madonna. This ceremony is rooted in the even more ancient rogations, propitiatory processions of Roman taste aimed at blessing the fields. However, what makes this ritual unique is the sacred heirloom, a relic whose arrival is handed down by a legend lost in the maze of time.
The story tells of a knight who arrived in Piteglio with a precious ampoule, containing drops of milk; the ecstatic people begged the soldier to leave it in the village, but he refused and tried to escape during the night. He was held back by the sudden and miraculous sound of the bells, so everyone noticed his evasion; in the following tumult, the bottle fell and the sacred contents spilled on the ground but the Piteglini promptly picked it up together with grass and pebbles. On the contrary, history suggests that the relic has a crusade origin and that its arrival in the village happened thanks to the Counts Guidi, owners of the castle of Piteglio and of the lands of Montevarchi, not by chance guardians of the relic of the Sacred Milk.
The famous ampoule finally leads us to its present casket, at the top of the town: the castle Pieve dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, which is the result of an adaptation of the watchtower and of the private chapel of San Martino of the Cunts Guidi. Subject to numerous renovations over the years, today the church has lost its medieval taste in favor of a more neo-classical aspect. An architectural frame, whose paintings evoke the deeply rooted Marian cult of the villagers of Piteglio. Among those, the most characteristic one is surely the painting depicting the Madonna and Child with Saints, of the eighteenth century, in which the little Jesus flaunts the ampoule with the Milk of the Virgin.
Piteglio, therefore, reveals itself to be the intimate custodian of an extremely heartfelt Marian veneration, a devotion older than Christianism itself, whose roots derive from archaic cults linked to the Mother Earth, a fertile woman who feeds her children with Sacred Milk.