Vertine historical timeline

The first mention is a private document of 1013. In an act of 1049, a certain Pietro di Pietro donated to the monastery of Coltibuono Integram suam portionem de castello e curte de Vertine; the same document shows that the place was the seat of a court comprising twelve mansi — twelve farm holdings, which is a measure of its size at the time.

For two centuries the ownership moves. Documents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries record the castle in the possession of several different families.

Gaiole exists because of Vertine. The first record of Gaiole is a charter of the Badia a Coltibuono of 1086, and it describes the inhabitants of the nearby castles of Vertine, Montegrossi and San Donato in Perano beginning to meet on the valley floor, along the Massellone torrent, to exchange goods. The town below is the market that this hill came down to.

In 1202 the Ricasoli arrive. That year gives the first indication of their presence; they were thereafter the owners until the modern era.

Twice they turned on Florence, and on their own relatives. In 1312 and in 1351 members of the Ricasoli family committed acts of rebellion against the Florentine authorities and against those members of their own family who had remained loyal to Florence. These acts appear to have been carried out with the concurrence of the Sienese.

Then, in the Aragonese wars, Vertine became their headquarters. Between 1452 and 1478 the castle became the principal residence of the Ricasoli, who in that period held the office of Commissari of the Republic of Florence for the Chianti — the family that had twice rebelled now administering the frontier for the city it had rebelled against.

In the sixteenth century the fortifications were restored at Vertine — the last military work on the place.

The church followed the castle's fortunes downward and then up. San Bartolomeo dates like the castle to the eleventh century, was originally smaller and set perpendicular to the present building, and served as a suffragan first of the pieve of San Pietro in Avenano and then of the pieve of Spaltenna. Its facade was rebuilt in neo-Romanesque form in the 1930s.

Today 22 people live here, and the borgo is visited for the very thing that two centuries of decline preserved: a medieval centre that was never rebuilt.

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