When it appears in the distance, it looks like a castle. There is nothing to make you suspect that inside those imposing, unfriendly walls, there exists an intense religious life. The Benedictine monks built it in 890 on the ruins of a Longobard fortress. In such spiritually restless times which had given rise to the great monastic reforms of St. Benedict in the western world, in opposition to the decline of the power of the Roman Church, many saintly men had honestly tried to return to the essence of the message of Christ. Among them was also St. Giovanni Gualberto who gave life to the so-called reform of Vallombrosa, sustained by the monks of Badia a Passignano where the saint spent the last days of his life and died in 1073. For many years the abbey became an important spiritual center of the Florentiane countryside. The building we want to visit today known as San Michele, is the result of several transformations which took place between the 13th and l5th centuries and of vast late 19th century neo-gothic style reconstruction. If we exclude the grandiose structures which form the abbey complex, we have to concentrate our attention mainly on the San Biagio, saved from looting and heavy restoration, it has preserved its original plan of a Romanesque basilica with a precious crypt with cross vaults.
We must not enter the church before having carefully examined the facade showing the essential purity of the 13th century stylistic features. Inside, there is a rich collection of Renaissance paintings relating episodes of the life of the patron saint or founding father. We can admire the works of artists such as Michele di Rodolfo del Ghirlandaio, one of the most eclectic representatives of the early Tuscan Style and then go on to masters like Il Passignano, Giovanni Maria Butteri and Alessandro Vignamaggio.

A note on Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper
In the refectory of Badia a Passignano, we can see the large fresco, painted between 1476 and 1477 by Domenico Ghirlandaio, not yet thirty years old. After this first test on such a delicate theme, he was commissioned to paint the same subject also in other important Florentine churches and the contado. First, the church of Ognissanti. The style of Ghirlandaio was still influenced by a certain academic immobility which does not reach the excellent results of his mature works but it is clearly visible in the expressive faces of the Apostles sitting next to Jesus Christ, already conceived as natural portraits. His non-rhetorical and undramatic style ts a typical feature as is the limitation of this important figure of the Florentine Renaissance, sometimes unjustly underestimated by artistic historiography.
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See Also:

Etruscans: The Origins, Suddenly, A Roman Bridge, Florentine Castles

or go back to The Origins of Chianti: The Journey Begins