Tuscany
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The “Madonna and the UFO” in Florence
The Sala d’Ercole in Florence’s historic Palazzo Vecchio houses a mysterious painting. The Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John was possibly the work by Sebastiano Mainardi and dates from the second half of the 15th century. The “Madonna and the UFO” Over time one detail has overshadowed the work’s stylistic disquisitions. Behind the…
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The Parish Church of Gropina and the Lombard pulpit
The Parish Church of San Pietro in Gropina, in the Valdarno, is as bare as a tree shaken by the wind on a winter morning. Nothing shows, except the mighty stone that has stood for centuries. There are no paintings, no colours, only a soft penumbra that pervades the spaces, fills every perspective of spiritual…
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The Lunigiana stele statues
An anthropomorphic figure, which seems to have re-emerged from a forgotten and primitive age of man, stares at visitors with an enigmatic archaic smile. The statue, made of sandstone, has a semicircular head; its stylised face has a simple U-shape, but mysteriously takes on an expressiveness that transcends time, and seems to look into the…
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La Verna Sanctuary, there is not a more holy mountain
The Sanctuary of La Verna is not only a physical place, it is the witness of something that dwells in the soul, of a mystery that no man could explain. In its intimate silences, verdant woods, among rocks of mystical essence, St. Francis received the stigmata on September 14, 1224, as historiography attests [1]. On…
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The town of San Quirico and the spiritual struggle of a pilgrim
The town of San Quirico stands out in the hills that mark the boundary between the Orcia and Asso valleys in Tuscany. These lands, shaped by verdant landscapes, still inspire suggestions of a distant and evocative past. There were echoes there of chivalric deeds, stonemasons at work, pilgrims dragging their weary steps over dusty paths,…
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Collodi Castle, the lost village
In the heart of the province of Pistoia, Tuscany, there is a fairy-tale village. Steep slopes and climbs, picturesque hamlets enveloped in a magical aura and verdant paths. In the place that gave birth to the puppet Pinocchio, the distant hamlet of Collodi Castle stands out, lost in time more than in space. This ancient…
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What Florence was like in the early centuries
We can locate the first settlement of Florence along the Arno River, where the Etruscans had built a ford at the closest point between the river banks. This was probably a wooden footbridge, which rested on stone piers. The ford stood not far from today’s Ponte Vecchio and connected the city of Vipsul, the ancient…
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The Altopascio Tau Knights
In the Tuscan branch of the Via Francigena, the ancient way that led pilgrims to Jerusalem, there is the nice village of Altopascio. Here, before 1084, there had been the Spedale “edificatus in locus et finibus ubi dicitur Teupascio”. This was the building devoted to the sustenance and treatments to the pilgrims passing through the adjacent…
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St. Galgano and the sword in the stone
A proud knight, the Holy Grail, the sword in the stone and Camelot… or Tuscany! Among enchanting natural landscapes, in a place shrouded in essential mysticism and of extraordinary historical importance, stands the Hermitage of Montesiepi. Here hides a great mystery: a legendary sword was embedded in the stone by a saint. And just beyond,…