MAIANO: THE VILLAGE AND ITS QUARRIERS

Maiano was the village where Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano, Renaissance architects and sculptors, came from, and where the sandstone quarries are located. There is a small church; John Temple Leader, who had purchased the villa and the farm of Maiano, had it rebuilt in 1885 in fourteenth Century style. There is an interesting monumental sepulchre composed of sarcophagus, niche and a late 17th Century stone statue of the Madonna. The farm, which had been a Benedictine monastery and is now owned by Miari Fulcis, features a cloister in pietra serena, where there is a 13th Century fresco by Spinello Aretino, depicting a Mater Misericordia.

Proceeding uphill beyond the church, there is a colossal open-cast quarry on the left hand side which tells immediately of the change the landscape has been subjected to by several centuries of stone quarrying and by the geological composition of Monte Ceceri itself. The quarries of Fiesole, which were exploited until the early twentieth Century, are renowned for the pietra serena widely used by sculptors since the 15th Century. Mentioned by Benvenuto Cellini and Giorgio Vasari, Fiesole stone was used for architecture and monuments, as well as for religious, non-religious and urban furnishings.