Commenda di Sant'Eufrosino, Volpaia historical timeline

It begins with a man joining an order. In 1443 ser Pietro di ser Lorenzo della Volpaia obtained from Pope Eugene IV permission to build, in the castle of Volpaia, a chapel dedicated to Sant'Eufrosino. The chapel was built as a sign of gratitude to the pontiff, who had granted ser Pietro permission to enter the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

The saint was in fashion. Sant'Eufrosino's cult was very much alive in those years — so much so that in the same period the sanctuary dedicated to him near Panzano in Chianti was also renewed.

It was attached to a hospital that was already there. The chapel was annexed to a pre-existing hospital belonging to the Hospitaller order itself. Volpaia also had an Ospedaletto dei Cavalieri di Malta at the centre of the castle, built around 1400 to shelter pilgrims on the road between the upper Pesa valley and the Valdarno.

Construction ran for some decades. The church was finished after 1460, and shortly afterwards was embellished with the altarpiece of the Madonna and Child between Saints Eufrosino and John the Baptist, dated 1480 and attributed to Cosimo Rosselli. That panel probably replaced an earlier one stolen during the sack the castle of Volpaia suffered in 1478, at the hands of Ferdinand of Aragon's troops in the second Aragonese invasion of the Chianti.

Three centuries of taste passed over it. In the first half of the seventeenth century the church was restored and adapted to the Baroque taste of the time. Half-abandoned in the first half of the eighteenth, it was restored again towards the end of that century, and in the second half of the nineteenth its original Renaissance style was reinstated.

In 1932 it was deconsecrated, and the Rosselli left. In 1982 it was declared a National Monument.

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