How Greve in Chianti was built and evolved over time

Greve was built as a market, and the plan shows it. The square is an elongated triangle because that is the shape left where the routes from the Valdarno, the Val di Greve and the Florence-to-Siena road converge. It was not laid out as a civic showpiece.

The porticoes are infrastructure. The square is for the most part surrounded by them, and a portico around a mercatale exists so that goods and traders stay dry and the market can run in any weather.

The centre and the vertex came later. The statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano by Romeo Pazzini occupies the middle, and the parish church of Santa Croce — a 19th-century building — occupies one of the three corners. The church did not generate the square; it was fitted into it.

Above it is the thing that came first. Montefioralle is a castle, formerly Monteficalle, and the borgo is almost circular — the shape of a settlement built inside a defensive ring rather than along a road. It keeps its walls, though partly absorbed into more recent buildings, and its streets are completely paved. Greve began as its dependency and then outgrew it, which is why the castle is intact and small and the market town below is neither.

The countryside was built in stone, early and often. The comune holds an unusual density of Romanesque pievi — San Pietro a Sillano, cited in the parchments of Badia a Passignano as early as 884; San Pietro a Cintoia, mentioned in 989; San Miniato di Rubbiana, attested from 1015 and carrying a stone recording its consecration in 1077 by the cardinal Pietro Igneo and the bishop of Fiesole; and San Donato a Citille, consecrated in 1072 on the road that linked the two Vallombrosan abbeys of Passignano and Montescalari.