Panzano in Chianti attractions

Four things, and they are within two kilometres of each other.

Up the hill. The castle of Panzano — the highest and oldest part of the village, twelfth-century in its masonry, entered by one gate, with a tall cassero over a small piazzetta and corner towers of which one became a bell tower and another keeps its machicolated gallery — and, continuous with it, the borgo documented in 1146.

In the village. The church of Santa Maria, rebuilt 1890–1903 around and over an older one, holding a Crucifix attributed to Jacopo Sansovino and dated 1510–1518, an Annunciation from the workshop of Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio of about 1520, and a fourteenth-century Madonna and Child given to Cenni di Francesco.

Below, on the Pesa side. The pieve di San Leolino, recorded from 982, head of a piviere of fourteen churches, with the Maestro di Panzano, Meliore di Jacopo, Mariotto di Nardo, Raffaellino del Garbo and two Della Robbia workshop tabernacles.

And out towards the valley. The oratorio di Sant'Eufrosino, first recorded 11 March 1102, with its Gothic reliquary edicola bearing the Peruzzi arms, and the Fontino spring beside it.

One more, easily missed. Just outside the castle on the road to Mercatale Val di Pesa stands the cappella di Santa Maria delle Grazie, known as the cappella delle Croci, built in thanksgiving for the end of the cholera epidemic of 1855.