Castellina in Chianti Culture

The town's symbol explains the region's. Castellina's arms, recognised by decree on 17 October 1932, show a church flanked by an open, windowed tower with a cockerel above it. The cock crowing from the half-ruined tower beside the old church of San Salvatore is the emblem of the Lega del Chianti, and also a reminder of the hard-won truce between the Florentine and Sienese republics of which the town was witness.

The legend is told at Fonterutoli. During the wars between Siena and Florence, Fonterutoli hosted the agreements that ended the dispute over the Chianti territories; the story goes that the boundary was to be set where two knights met, each riding from his own city at the first cock-crow — and they met near Fonterutoli.

Sacred art survives in fragments, mostly rescued — and frequently misattributed. The chiesa di San Salvatore holds a detached fresco of the Madonna with Child by the early-fifteenth-century painter known as the Maestro di Signa, a polychrome wooden San Barnaba by a sculptor of the mid-Quattrocento, and, in a reliquary case, the body of San Fausto martire, given by a wealthy Sienese family. From that moment San Fausto became protector of the Chianti, invoked in drought and at the vintage. The Madonna and Child with Saints by Bicci di Lorenzo that guidebooks sometimes put in this church is a different picture in a different building: it belongs to the pieve di Sant'Agnese in Chianti, out in the comune's nature reserve.

Music returns to the fortress each July. Musica al Museo, promoted by the comune, puts concerts in the fifteenth-century Rocca and pairs each evening with the wines of a Castellina estate. Entry is free.