How Radda in Chianti was built and evolved over time

The town plan is the oldest thing here and the best preserved. Radda's centre is a single main street with a small square off it, onto which both the Palazzo del Podestà and the parish church face; from that spine, lesser streets branch and close into a ring. Because the layout has not been modified across the centuries, the ordinary houses kept their medieval structures, which only came back to light in restorations towards the end of the twentieth century.

The walls were a Florentine investment. Radda's strategic importance in the fifteenth century led the Republic to give the borgo a masonry defence. A first circuit had already been built in the fourteenth century, but the defences were strengthened after the Aragonese wars, especially after 1478, when Radda was taken and sacked; the works ran on into the first years of the sixteenth century.

What is left of them has been absorbed into the town. Short stretches and several towers survive, the best-preserved facing the public gardens. The line of the circuit is not easy to follow because of the buildings put up against it over the centuries, and both access gates have disappeared.

The Palazzo del Podestà is legible in layers. The portico belongs to the original building, in the manner of early-fifteenth-century minor Florentine architecture. The first-floor windows belong to the rebuilding after 1478. The second floor and the prisons were added in the eighteenth century.

An icehouse is a building type too. Grand-ducal Tuscany built ghiacciaie in several places; many were pyramidal, like the one in the Cascine at Florence, but Radda's was made as a half-buried truncated cone. Pressed snow was packed in over winter and, thanks to the construction and a rigorously north-facing exposure, turned into perfect blocks of ice.

The most conspicuous surface in town is a hundred years old. The Propositura di San Niccolò had always lacked a facade; one was built in 1926 to a design by Adolfo Coppedè, and the square below it was remade at the same time with the public fountain whose water issues from a lion's mouth. Its style is called neo-Romanesque by some accounts and neo-Gothic by others; what is there is a great round arch under a gabled roof carried on two lion-head corbels, with a rose window and a terracotta lunette.