What to see · Campi Bisenzio

More places of interest

• Chiesa di Sant'Andrea

  The church of Sant'Andrea is the main church of San Donnino, a district of Campi Bisenzio on the Via Pistoiese, on the edge of Florence. A first building rose in the eleventh century on the road between Florence and Pistoia; once called Sant'Andrea a Brozzi, it was for centuries subsidiary to the parish church of Brozzi, and today it shares its priest with San Donnino a Campi. Over the centuries it was altered several times under the patronage of the Mazzinghi and Tornaquinci families. In August 1944 the bell tower was blown up, damaging the apse, and on 4 November 1966 the Florence flood hit the church hard: many works were then moved to the museum next door.

  What to see

  The church has a fifteenth-century marble holy-water stoup and a wall altar with a stone arch, frescoed in the fifteenth century by the Ghirlandaio with the Baptism of Christ and the Madonna and Child enthroned between Saints Sebastian and Julian. The painted crucifix on the high altar is by Giovanni di Francesco, from around 1455.

  In the adjoining cloister is the Museum of Sacred Art, opened in the nineteen-nineties at the initiative of the prior Giovanni Momigli. It holds the fifteenth-century stone pulpit, the Annunciation between Saints Eustace and Anthony Abbot by the so-called Master of the Brozzi Annunciation, a fourteenth-century triptych from the church of San Donnino, two fifteenth-century panels with Saint Julian and Saint Roch, works by Botticini, a lunette with Saints Albert and Sigismund linked to Raffaellino del Garbo and a Madonna of the Rosary with saints by Matteo Rosselli, along with goldsmith's work, documents and vestments.

  Visiting

  Opening times for the church and museum should be checked with the parish. Next door is Spazio Reale, a complex set up by the prior that hosts cultural, social and sports activities.

  Our editors' tip

  In 1919 the church had been reduced to a storehouse for farm produce, and its recovery only began in 1934 with the engineer Alfredo Barbacchi. The building was once surrounded by an orchard, and the loggia on the façade was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

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