In the centre of Montalcino, the church of Santa Croce tells a story of disappearance and return. Rebuilt over the remains of an earlier oratory, it served as the seat of a lay company founded in the fourteenth century — one of the confraternities that for hundreds of years ran charity and devotional life in Tuscan towns. When the company was suppressed in 1785, the building's fortunes sank with it and the church was abandoned.
Its second life began in 1872, when it was restored and reopened for worship. To mark the occasion, the town council of Montalcino presented the church with a fresco image of the Madonna della Provvidenza, painted in the first quarter of the sixteenth century and linked on stylistic grounds to the manner of the Sienese painter Bernardino Fungai.
What to see
The fresco is the heart of the visit: an early sixteenth-century work that places this small church within the orbit of Sienese painting between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the season in which Fungai worked. That the donor was a town hall, rather than a bishop or a noble family, is an unusual detail — a small window onto post-unification Italy and the new role of municipalities as custodians of religious art.
The building itself reads as a palimpsest: beneath its present form lie the remains of the older oratory and the memory of the confraternity that met here for more than four centuries.
Visiting
A few minutes suffice for the interior, and like many of Montalcino's smaller churches it may not keep regular hours. It slots easily into a walking tour of the historic centre, which can be covered comfortably in half a day between lanes, workshops and viewpoints over the Val d'Orcia.
Our editors' tip
If you find the door open, seek out the Madonna della Provvidenza and consider its double journey: painted in the early 1500s, given by the town council in 1872. Then climb to the fourteenth-century fortress — the contrast between the military machine of the rocca and this small confraternity church captures the two souls of medieval Montalcino, the town that defended itself and the town that cared for its own.