Oratorio di Sant'Eufrosino, Panzano in Chianti site features

The oratory itself is a single room with a square end. Its structure goes back to the fifteenth century: a gabled roof cross-vaulted over a single nave, closed by a scarsella.

The portico came two centuries later. It was added in the seventeenth century, across the facade and along the right side. Inside, restorations of the same period changed the face of the church: the altars were rebuilt, and a large niche was constructed to house the polychrome plaster statue of Sant'Eufrosino and a small reliquary.

A single transverse arch divides the room. It separates nave from presbytery and carries capitals in pietra serena carved with foliage.

The best object is in the corner of the presbytery. On the end wall, at the left angle, stands a Gothic ambo in the form of an edicola, which originally must have housed the saint's relics: two small pilasters carrying a trilobed arch inside a cusp decorated with rampant leaves, with two pierced panels of quatrefoils below, and on the corbels the arms of the Peruzzi — perhaps the commissioners of the work. The record suggests the ambo may have been recovered from a Florentine church and given by the Peruzzi at the time the building was enlarged.

Behind the oratory is a chapel with a legend attached. In the yard at the back stands a small chapel that tradition says was raised in memory of a miracle of the saint, who at that point made a spring of water gush out. It keeps an altar in pietra serena of the twelfth century and traces of fifteenth-century frescoes, and there is the opening of a well whose waters were said to have therapeutic qualities.

And the spring itself is a little temple on four columns. The Fontino di Sant'Eufrosino, beside the oratory, is a source the saint is said to have used in his lifetime; over it has been built a small sacello carried on four columns, and inside are kept the ex-votos.

The Fontino

The reason for the pilgrimage. A spring Sant'Eufrosino is said to have used, covered by a small shrine on four columns and hung inside with ex-votos. An earlier description gives it as two masonry columns supporting a sandstone architrave, with the spring inside and the bust of the saint above it, the whole covered by a cusp with a pinnacle.

A Gothic edicola with the Peruzzi arms

The piece of greatest artistic prestige here. Two small pilasters, a trilobed arch within a cusp of rampant leaves, two pierced quatrefoil panels beneath, and the Peruzzi coat of arms on the corbels. It originally held the saint's relics, and may have been brought from a Florentine church.

One of only two Eufrosino churches in the Chianti

The other is the Commenda di Sant'Eufrosino at Volpaia, in Radda in Chianti. Two buildings in one small region for a Cappadocian evangeliser is itself the measure of the cult.

Filaretto under the portico

Under the portico, in the initial stretch of the right wall, survive remains of filaretto belonging to a building of more modest dimensions — perhaps the very building recorded in the twelfth-century document. The 1441 work was a rebuilding, not a foundation.

A chapel over a miracle

Behind the oratory, raised where the saint is said to have made water spring. Inside, a twelfth-century pietra serena altar and traces of fifteenth-century frescoes, with a well whose water was held to be therapeutic.

Mapped by a Florentine hospital in 1565

Around 1514 the oratory and the pieve di San Leolino increased the patrimony of the ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova of Florence, and in 1565 a cabreo was made — the Campione delle Piante delle possessioni dello Spedale di S. Maria Nuova. One of its maps shows the Podere di Sant'Eufrosino di sopra with its boundaries, annotations and three buildings: the Cappella, the Casa del lavoratore and the Oratorio di San Frosino.

A nineteenth-century cult society

In 1852 an association was founded whose purpose was spreading the cult of Sant'Eufrosino, with printed images of the saint accompanied by prayers of intercession.