The church of San Benedetto a Settimo stands in the village of San Benedetto, on the Tosco-Romagnola road, in the municipality of Cascina. It is recorded from 861: according to the historian Emanuele Repetti, before the first millennium its patronage belonged, at least in part, to the bishops of Lucca, although for worship it depended on those of Pisa. In 1540 it was rebuilt on its present site with funds from the convent of the Santissima Annunziata, together with a bell tower, a convent and a walled garden, and entrusted to the Servite friars. The nineteenth-century restorations kept the sixteenth-century walls and volumes.
What to see
The front is plain; the jambs of the side door are sixteenth-century and above it is a fresco of the risen Christ with open arms. The interior has a single nave with six side chapels. In the lunette of the north wall Giuliano di Giovanni De Castellani painted the Marriage of the Virgin in 1541, with a rabbi joining the hands of Mary and Joseph, two musicians and two girls looking out of windows; the Madonna of Mercy in the vaulted chapel dates from the same year. Behind the altar, Pier Francesco Foschi's altarpiece with Saint Peter and Saint Philip Benizi frames the fourteenth-century icon of the Madonna del Piano. There is also the Madonna of the Cherries by Francesco di Neri da Volterra, from 1371, with the Child eating a cherry.
On the front of the high altar is a fourteenth-century English alabaster antependium from Nottingham: seven low-relief panels with the Joyful Mysteries, between Saint John the Baptist with the lamb and Saint Andrew with the X-shaped cross. It was originally an altarpiece; when it was turned into an antependium in 1802, the frame and crowning pieces were lost, but four statuettes of the Fathers of the Church are now fixed to the walls. The font was assembled by the Stagi sculptors of Pietrasanta from parts of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century holy-water stoups.
Visiting
The church also keeps a parchment from 1224, a thirteenth-century censer and a Roman missal. Mass times and opening hours should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
Read the antependium from the left: the Visitation comes before the Annunciation, against the order of the story, and the words in the scrolls are carved in Roman capitals rather than the Gothic lower case used on older pieces of this kind.
