The one-thousand-year-old parish church of St. Giovanni Maggiore, which maintains the remarkable bell tower and a splendid marble ambo in its antique structures of the XII century, is remarkably altered on the inside, in which numerous testimonies of the activity of the Chinis may be admired. Already in 1843, Pietro Alessio Chini had carried out the decoration of the ceiling of the central nave, painting the Baptism of Christ, framed by a beautiful motif with artificial prospective consoles, by a refined vegetable festoon and by other grotesque, vegetable decorations. The decoration of the money-bag and perhaps of the chapel at the head of the left nave seem to be referred to the same Pietro Alessio. These works desired by the then parish priest Alessandro Magnani, appear as one of the most significant works of Pietro Alessio, in which he brings attention to himself as an author certainly integrated in the Florentine academic environment of the middle of the 19th. century, but possessing a successful and imaginative decorative inspiration.
The ceiling of the church is also decorated with artificial coffers with rosettes, realized by Dino Chini. Subsequently, on the occasion of a further restoration intervention in 1912 followed by the engineer Niccolò Niccolai and by Galileo, and carried out by Dino Chini, the church was provided with a covering of tiles on the walls, destined to imitate a marble covering. Besides this, Dino Chini had retouched the existing paintings, amongst which, probably, the Baptism of Christ, carried out the previously-mentioned monochromatic artificial coffers on the ceiling of the central nave, the architectural facades, of Renaissance taste, and the geometrical decorations of the two side altars, as well as those, again of geometrical type, of the under-arch of the chapel of the baptismal font.
The decoration of the tombstone to the fallen, crowned by a beautiful painted vegetable festoon which climbs down on the sides, and that of artificial drapes with two coats of arms, one of which with the date 1930, placed on the left side behind the major altar, also seem to be assignable to the hand of Dino. The San Lorenzo Furnaces also supplied the small crosses in ceramic inside the tondos, applied to the walls and pillars of the building, as well as perhaps the panels of the “Via Crucis” and the stoup on the left.
The windows of the naves have polychromatic stained-glass windows with splendid neo-Renaissance decorations which frame the coats of arms of the most illustrious families of the area, together with those of Pope Pio X, of Cardinal Mistrangelo, archbishop of Florence at the time, and of the local Company of the Holy Sacrament.
The undoubted high quality of the design of these windows calls to mind the ideational intervention of the same Galileo, who nevertheless had to make the drawings some time before the interventions finished in 1912, because in that year he was already in Siam working on the royal palace of Bangkok. The works of preparation of the frameworks in iron and lead of the windows is thanks to the blacksmith Carlo Torrelli from Luco di Mugello.
The other two staine-glass windows may be attributed to the Furnaces, the first of which, portraying the Angelus Dei, is in a small environment to which one enters from the right side of the presbytery, the second located in the padded window of the rear wall of the presbytery and seems to bear the Savoia coat of arms and that of Pope Pio XI, perhaps in celebration of the agreement between the State and the Church in the Lateranensi Pact which took place in 1929.
Again on the same wall two great tombstones are embedded, put there to remember the fallen of the Great War and for which Chini manufacturing realized the ceramic components. Under the left one, there is another small round plaque with a ceramic vegetable festoon. On the outside, under the luminous open gallery, beside the central door, the celebrative plaque for the seventh centennial of the death of St. Francis of Assisi (1926) realized by Augusto Chini, is also embedded in the wall.
Itinerario Liberty - Planning and Realization - Stefano Pelosi - www.stefanopelosi.it
