Pieve di San Leolino, Panzano in Chianti historical timeline

The first record is a parchment of 982. The church is remembered from that year under the name San Leolino a Flacciano, in a document of the abbey of Passignano — Flacciano being the name the locality carried before it became Panzano.

Two carved fragments inside argue it is older. From them the record supposes an origin earlier still; the pluteo under the altar table is dated between the eighth and the ninth century.

The building you see is twelfth-century. That is deduced from its structural and stylistic characteristics rather than from a document — the usual way a Chianti church is dated.

In the Middle Ages it headed a piviere of fourteen. The church had great importance and fourteen suffragan churches depended on it, including the one inside the castle of Panzano — which is to say the village's own church answered to this one, out here below the hill.

In 1508 the patronage went to a hospital. It passed to the Florentine ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, and around 1514 the pieve and the nearby oratory of Sant'Eufrosino together increased that hospital's patrimony. From the sixteenth century began the works of restoration and transformation that gave the church its present external appearance.

The eighteenth century dressed it and 1942 undressed it. A Baroque refit plastered the walls and built side altars; the restorations of 1942 removed all of it and brought the church back to its primitive Romanesque aspect. A further campaign in the early 1980s relaid the internal floor.

And in 1997 a community moved in. The Comunità di San Leolino, founded at Florence in 1986, has lived in the pieve since then.

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