Chiesa di Monte San Michele

The church is about 850 meters high and today is part of the farm of San Michele but in the past it was home to a monastic complex of ancient origin that during the twelfth century was aggregated to the Camaldolese Congregation along with the nearby Abbey of Montemuro, as evidenced by various imperial donations.
History
Destroyed during the numerous conflicts that occurred in the late Middle Ages, the Camaldolese Abbey of San Michele certainly had much larger features than the current building. In more recent times the church belonged first to the parish of the nearby Montemuro, then to that of Torsoli and to that of Casole. Until the beginning of the 20th century, on the occasion of the feasts of San Michele, numerous processions left the nearby towns of Valdarno and Chianti to flow into the small oratory. This tradition, now irretrievably lost, is the most recent manifestation of a very ancient Micaelic cult that involved much of the Chianti mountains. Nearby there are many small places of worship dedicated to the Archangel, organized on the ancient mountain roads that connected Florence, Arezzo and Siena. The church is a building referable to the fourteenth - fifteenth century. It is a small church originally with a single nave but transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century into a church with three small naves. The building has no external architectural decoration. It is worth mentioning the presence inside the church of a fresco depicting the Madonna and Saints (including the Archangel Michael) attributed to Paolo Schiavo and made in the first half of the fifteenth century. The fresco is inserted inside an aedicule in the shape of an ark. The arch overhangs the main altar made with octagonal columns with nailed capitals.