Wonderful glimpses of summer

It was built in the early seventeenth century. Instead of a small sixteenth-century oratory, a church and a convent were built, which in the mid-seventeenth century became a Franciscan.

Prato is an Italian town of 194,390 inhabitants, the capital of the province of the same name in Tuscany. It is the second largest city in Tuscany and the third in central Italy by number of inhabitants after Rome and Florence. Until 1992, the year of the constitution of the province of the same name, it was the most populated non-provincial town in Italy, then in the province of Florence. The Prato plain was inhabited since the Etruscan era, but the birth of the city itself dates back, generally, to the 10th century, when we have news of two contiguous but distinct inhabited centers, Borgo al Cornio and Castrum Prati, which merged during the following century. In the Prato economy, textile production has always played a leading role since the Middle Ages, as evidenced by the documents of the merchant Francesco Datini, but it is in the nineteenth century that Prato saw an impetuous industrial development, which still make it one of the most important districts at the European level. The city boasts historical and artistic attractions of great importance, with a cultural itinerary that begins with the Etruscans and then expanded in the Middle Ages and reached its peak with the Renaissance, when artists of the caliber of Donatello, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli.

San Miniato is an Italian municipality in Tuscany. The historic center of the city is located in a strategic position on a hill halfway between Florence and Pisa.

The parish church of S. Giovanni Battista Decollato opens onto the square of the village. The parish church of Montemurlo has an ancient and controversial history, we find the first trace of it when Otto III, on the occasion of his coronation as emperor (995), descends to Italy for Rome and on his journey (998) confirms the possessions of Bishop Antonino of Pistoia among which our pieve is noted. It has a simple plan, with a single nave with presbytery and choir, modified in the second half of the last century. Originally the parish church had very small dimensions and it was only during the 16th century that we witness the first expansion works carried out by the humanist Bartolomeo Fonzio, parish priest in Montemurlo from 1494 to 1520, who had the rectory and the cloister built alongside the church, of which however, the round arches and columns with Corinthian capitals now walled up can still be traced. The parish church is 'protected' by an imposing bell tower which was originally a watchtower then transformed and refined, in the first half of the 16th century as part of the transformations carried out by the active parish priest, with the large mullioned windows that we see on each side, surmounted by brick arches. The large window is supported by octagonal columns and the shutters of the arches that conclude the tower are decorated with a notched frame that also surrounds the roof. Entering the church we cross a loggia, added during the 17th century, supported by brick columns with Ionic-inspired capitals. The interior of the church, with a goat-like roof, is enriched by four aedicule altars, one of which dates back to the 16th century, a model for the others built in the 18th century. On the altars and walls of the presbytery, valuable paintings by the painters Francesco Granacci, Giovanni Stradano, Matteo rosselli and Giacinto Fabroni.

Siena is an Italian town of 53 818 inhabitants, the capital of the province of the same name in Tuscany. The city is universally known for its huge historical, artistic and landscape heritage and for its substantial stylistic unity of medieval urban furniture, as well as for the famous Palio. In 1995 its historic center was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city is home to the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472 and therefore the oldest bank in business as well as the longest-running in the world.

The church of San Giusto is a church in Lucca located in the square of the same name. The current building, built on a previous one, dates back to the second half of the 12th century.

San Gimignano is an Italian town of 7 447 inhabitants in the province of Siena in Tuscany. For the characteristic medieval architecture of its historic center it has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The site of San Gimignano, despite some nineteenth-twentieth-century restorations, is mostly intact in its thirteenth-fourteenth century appearance and is one of the best examples in Europe of urban organization of the municipal age. Granted by Royal Decree of 29 April 1936, San Gimignano boasts the title of city San Gimignano stands on a place certainly inhabited by the Etruscans, at least from the third century BC. The hill was chosen for strategic reasons, being dominant (324 m a.s.l.) over the high Val d'Elsa. On the slopes of Poggio del Comune (624 m a.s.l.) there are the ruins of Castelvecchio, a village from the Lombard period. The first mention dates back to 929. In the Middle Ages the city was located on one of the routes of the Via Francigena, which Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, traveled between 990 and 994 and which for him represented the 19th stage (Mansio) of his itinerary return from Rome to England. Sigeric named it Sancte Gemiane, also indicating the village as a point of intersection with the road between Pisa and Siena. According to tradition, the name derives from the holy bishop of Modena, who defended the village from the occupation of Attila. The first city walls dates back to 998 and included the hill of Montestaffoli, where there was already a fortress seat of the market owned by the bishop of Volterra, and the poggio della Torre with the bishop's castle.

The church of San Cristoforo is a church of Lucca in Tuscany located in via Fillungo. Built in the 11th century, it was rebuilt in the mid-12th century.