Badia a Coltibuono historical timeline

The site was already holy. A church is documented at Coltibuono from the middle of the tenth century, in the piviere of San Pietro in Avenano. The abbey proper was founded in 1049 by the Florentine Firidolfi and, a couple of years later, donated to San Giovanni Gualberto.

By 1115 it is certainly Vallombrosan. A bull of Pope Paschal II to Adimaro, abbot of Vallombrosa, and an act of Conrad of Scheiern, marquis of Tuscany, of 1122, both attest the monks in possession.

Then it got rich. Numerous and substantial donations made the cenobium one of the wealthiest in the region; at its height it controlled the badia Ardenga, the abbey of Spineta and the monastery of San Jacopo in Siena. From 1239 it was under the protection of the Republic of Florence. Its revenues were large enough that it was granted in commendam, together with the badia a Passignano, to cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Pope Leo X.

On 29 September 1810, during the festivities for the birth of the King of Rome — Napoleon's son — a decree expelled the religious from all monasteries. The abbey was accordingly suppressed and sold; its buildings became a farm and the church a simple parish church.

The buyer could not take possession, because of one monk. Giovanni Calamai, a wealthy Livorno merchant who already owned farms nearby, found the suppression had provoked the furious protest of the parishioners. The faithful gathered around the single remaining monk, don Ilarione Parenti, who also acted as parish priest and mounted a resistance stubborn enough that he faced down a detachment of French soldiers sent to evict him. Wanting no further trouble, Calamai leased the badia to one Giovanni Checcacci of Montevarchi for 4,700 scudi.

Then the whole thing was raffled. The Napoleonic adventure ended and Calamai's fortune with it; ruined by bad speculations and besieged by creditors, in 1816 he set up a lottery whose prizes were landed properties, Coltibuono among them, valued at 98,000 scudi. The lottery faltered — it needed 60,000 tickets for an estimated take of 240,000 lire — so Calamai dumped the lot on count Giovanni Giraud, a Roman adventurer, who magically turned out to hold the winning ticket.

Accused of fraud, Giraud sold fast — to a Polish prince. The buyer was Stanisław Poniatowski, nephew of King Stanisław August of Poland, then living in Florence. Attached to Cassandra Luci, he married her in 1830; widowed, she and the children squandered the whole patrimony financing shows and operas, and were themselves soon overwhelmed by debt.

In 1846 it was sold to a man who got it in writing first. Cavalier Guido Giuntini, before paying, obtained every guarantee from the Vatican against a possible return of the Vallombrosans. The estate passed by inheritance through various owners and belongs today to the Stucchi Prinetti family, making organic wine and oil under the abbey's label.

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