Propositura di San Niccolò, Radda in Chianti historical timeline

The first record is a war document. San Niccolò appears in 1260 in the Libro di Montaperti, together with the churches of San Cassiano and Santa Cristina di Radda, the three administered by a single rector. In the tithe lists of 1276 and 1303 it is a suffragan of the pieve di San Giusto in Salcio.

A fifteenth-century account book shows what the parish actually paid for. In the 1427 catasto declarations the rector cites the expenses borne for the feasts of San Clemente and San Paolo — neither of them the church's titular.

It accumulated dependencies and then lost one. In the seventeenth century the oratory of Santa Maria del Prato was united to it; that union lasted until 1708, when the oratory was ceded to the Franciscan friars so that they might found a convent — the convent that now houses the Casa Chianti Classico. A pastoral visit of 1784 records that the church of San Biagio a Vercenni had been annexed to it.

Its rank rose twice. The niche for the baptismal font was built in 1616; the church was raised to a priory in 1660 and to the title of Propositura in 1899.

Then the Second World War. The church, like the historic centre of Radda, was notably damaged — so much so that were it not for the reports drawn up on pastoral visits and the ecclesiastical inventories, it would be very difficult to reconstruct the appearance the church must have had between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The facade came before the war, not after. In 1926 the front was remade by Adolfo Coppedè, and on that occasion the square below was also remade, with the creation of the public fountain whose water runs from a lion's mouth.

The bell tower has its own sequence. Restored in 1837; the original having been demolished and rebuilt in the eighteenth century; the present one built in the 1950s, leaning on one of the towers of the ancient castle of Radda. The last works on the church fabric were in 1969, when the apse was restored and a new presbytery made, and in 1997, with the consolidation of the bell tower and the installation of a mechanism for striking the hours.

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