Palazzo del Podestà, Radda in Chianti site features

The front of the building is a document. Walled into the main external facade are numerous coats of arms of the various podestà who succeeded one another over time. There are 51 of them, and they are datable: 3 from the fifteenth century, 25 from the sixteenth, 16 from the seventeenth and 7 from the eighteenth.

Under the loggia are the two things worth stopping for. The coat of arms of Francesco Ferrucci, podestà in 1527, and a fresco of the Florentine school going back to the Cinquecento.

The portico is the oldest part standing. It belongs to the primitive building and to the manner of minor Florentine architecture of the early fifteenth century — the plain, well-proportioned civic idiom of the Florentine contado rather than anything grand.

The windows date the recovery. The first-floor windows belong to the reconstruction after 1478, the year the Aragonese took and sacked Radda and left the palace almost completely destroyed.

The top of the building is the eighteenth century. The second floor and the prisons were added then — an administrative building acquiring a gaol, which tells you what the podestà's work had become.

It sits in a town that never changed shape. Radda's historic centre is one main street with this small square opening off it, and because the layout has not been modified over the centuries the ordinary houses around kept their medieval structures, brought back to light only in restorations at the end of the twentieth century.

Fifty-one coats of arms, counted and dated

The single most unusual thing in Radda. Each shield belonged to a podestà — the magistrate Florence appointed — and the collection has been counted: 3 from the fifteenth century, 25 from the sixteenth, 16 from the seventeenth, 7 from the eighteenth. The sixteenth-century bulge is the Grand Duchy consolidating its grip.

Francesco Ferrucci, 1527

Under the loggia hangs the shield of the most famous man to hold the office here, podestà in 1527. The square outside carries his name.

A Florentine fresco of the Cinquecento

Also under the loggia, and also outdoors — a sixteenth-century fresco of the Florentine school, in the one sheltered part of the facade.

The portico

The surviving fragment of the original Quattrocento palace, in the idiom of early-fifteenth-century minor Florentine architecture. Everything above it is later.

Seat of the Capitano della Lega

For four centuries this building housed the captain of the Lega del Chianti — the alliance created by Florence in 1384, whose arms were a black rooster on a gold field, later modified into the mark of Chianti Classico. The League was suppressed in 1774.

And it is still the town hall

Since 1865. The Comune di Radda in Chianti is at Piazza Ferrucci 1, switchboard 0577 739633 — which makes this one of the few medieval seats of government in Tuscany still doing the job.