Propositura di San Niccolò, Radda in Chianti site features

Traces of the original Romanesque church survive in two places: at the rear of the building, and in the base of the bell tower.

The facade is the thing people photograph, and it is a century old. On it is set a great round arch surmounted by a gabled roof carried on two large corbels in the form of lion heads. Within the arch are the traces of a fresco — the Blessing Christ above the rose window and the Nativity below — today almost invisible, and attributed to Carlo Coppedè, Adolfo's brother.

The materials are local. The masonry of the lower part of the facade is of sandstone blocks, and the access portal is sandstone too, surmounted by a lunette at whose centre is a terracotta Madonna and Child, flanked by two angels in white-glazed terracotta.

Inside it is a single nave on a Latin cross, roofed with wooden trusses and closed by a quadrangular apse, with the transept in the apse zone.

The furnishings run from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Two pietra serena holy-water stoups just inside the door; on the left, in a niche, the seventeenth-century pietra serena baptismal font — its niche built in 1616 — with a twentieth-century fresco of the Baptism of Christ; two eighteenth-century wooden confessionals; and a marble pulpit high on the left wall.

The best painting is in the left transept. Over a pietra serena altar hangs a canvas of the Madonna del Rosario with the Child and Saints, formerly assigned to Alessandro Allori but to be attributed to Francesco Boldrini, datable to about 1633. A small chapel off this transept holds an image of the Madonna di Lourdes.

The right transept has the organ. A similar altar, a statue of the Blessing Christ, and an organ datable to the middle of the nineteenth century. An organ already figured in San Niccolò in 1634, when the organist was the prior himself, Giovan Battista Paolini, and the old instrument is recalled in the pastoral visit of 1784.

A facade that arrived in 1926

The church had always remained without one. The front built between 1926 and 1930 to Adolfo Coppedè's design is a typical example of the application of late historicist eclectic taste in the minor centres of Tuscany — and the reason Radda's main square looks the way it does.

Two brothers, two jobs

Adolfo Coppedè designed the facade. The frescoes within the great arch — a Blessing Christ above the rose window and a Nativity below, now almost invisible — are attributed to his brother Carlo. Some accounts credit the facade itself to Carlo; the church's own record does not.

The lion-mouth fountain

The 1926 campaign also remade the square below the church and created the public fountain from which the water issues from a lion's mouth. The two lion-head corbels carrying the gable above are the same idea, higher up.

A drawing of what was there before

Coppedè's project includes a pencil drawing showing the facade before the intervention — which is how anyone knows what was replaced.

The Madonna del Rosario, reattributed

In the left transept, over a pietra serena altar: a canvas of the Madonna del Rosario with the Child and Saints, long assigned to Alessandro Allori but now to be attributed to Francesco Boldrini, around 1633.

A bell tower leaning on a castle

The original tower was demolished and rebuilt in the eighteenth century, restored in 1837, and the present one was built in the 1950s, leaning against one of the towers of the ancient castle of Radda. It was consolidated in 1997, when a mechanism to strike the hours was installed.

And the Romanesque underneath

Visible at the rear of the building and in the base of the bell tower — the two places a new facade could not reach.