How Panzano in Chianti was built and evolved over time

The castle dates itself twice over, by masonry and by arch. The record is explicit: it is the accuracy of the wall facing and the form of the archivolts across all the buildings of the castle that place its structures in the twelfth century. No inscription and no charter does it — the stonework does.

The wall was reduced rather than demolished. Good stretches of the circuit that ringed the hill survive; on two sides it has been lowered in height, and on the south-east it is gone altogether. Both are the ordinary fate of a defensive wall in a village that stopped needing one.

Two corner towers survive, and one changed job. One was reused as the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria — a military tower converted to a campanile, the cheapest way a village ever acquired one. Another still keeps its apparato a sporgere, the corbelled gallery projecting from the wall head.

The plan inside is as simple as a plan gets. One access gate, which may originally have had an antiporta; one street from it; one small piazzetta at the end; and the cassero — a tall tower rising above every other building — facing onto it.

The church of Santa Maria was rebuilt forwards and backwards at once. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, side chapels were created, the nave was prolonged at the front until the new facade swallowed part of the bell tower, and it was extended at the back into the two semicircles there now. The joins are legible from the old graveyard, looking at the left flank.

The pieve was restored by subtraction. An eighteenth-century Baroque refit plastered the walls and added side altars; the restoration of 1942 stripped all of it out and returned the church to its Romanesque form, and a further campaign in the early 1980s relaid the floor.