Chiusdino

Chiusdino was founded under Lombard rule between 568 and 569, on a metalliferous hill between the Val di Farma and the upper Merse. The village sits at 564 meters; five kilometers below it, on the floor of the Merse valley, the ground opens into flatter pasture where the Cistercians later built. The two sites read as a pair: the hill town where a wealthy knight was born around 1148, and the valley floor where, a century later, an entire abbey rose to mark what he had done above it on Monte Siepi.

Galgano climbed that hill on Christmas Day 1180, drove his sword into a rock as a cross, and lived as a hermit until he died the following year. Pope Lucius III canonized him in 1185. Metallurgical analysis has dated the blade still fixed in the stone to the late twelfth century, which places the object itself in the period the story claims for it. The Cistercians who built below, between the 1220s and 1280s, worked in the French Gothic style at the scale of a cathedral; when the roof came down in 1786 it was never replaced, and the church has stood open to the weather since. A hill settlement, a hermit's rock above it, and an unroofed church on the valley floor below: three sites at different elevations, each holding a different stage of the same account.