The pieve of Sant'Andrea stands at Cercina, in the municipality of Sesto Fiorentino, on the hills north of Florence. Its origins are ancient: in the documents it appears as Santa Gerusalemme before taking the name of Sant'Andrea. In the fourteenth century the rooms for the rector and the parish priest were enlarged, and in the fifteenth the cloister was laid out; a sixteenth-century portico links the church to the sixteenth-century façade of the parish house.
What to see
The bell tower has an unusual feature: the belfry projects beyond the shaft of the tower. In the right apse are the early frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio with Saints Jerome, Barbara and Anthony Abbot: they were walled up in the seventeenth century, when the apses were closed and the main chapel enlarged, rediscovered in 1923 and last restored in 1969. In the central apse is the fourteenth-century polyptych by the Master of San Niccolò, and at the end of the left aisle are late sixteenth-century frescoes.
Other works include a Resurrection of Christ between Saints Anthony of Padua, Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria by Francesco Curradi, a sixteenth-century Virgin enthroned between Saints Andrew and John the Baptist, a marble baptismal font of 1613 and a holy water stoup, also in marble, of 1540.
Visiting
The pieve is in the village of Cercina. Opening hours should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
A wooden statue of the Madonna, perhaps of the twelfth century, was venerated here and drew an annual procession of a Florentine lay company, in which Saint Antoninus and Pope Leo X also took part.
