Badia di Sant'Andrea

The Badia di Sant’Andrea is situated along the way that leads to San Clemente from the village of Loro Ciuffenna, in Tuscany. Already existent in the XI century, in 1425 it was annexed to the abbey of Vallombrosa. The building, an example of particularly austere Romanesque art, presents a façade with big sandstone ashlars with a simple architraved portal and a double-arched window with capitals. On the final part there is the small bell gable. The inside, with a single nave and covered in wood, ends with a quadrangular apse with a barrel vault. The apsidal part is separated by a wall on which there is an eighteenth-century painting of the Madonna with Child among the saints Andrea and Giovanni Gualberto. Near the presbytery you can see a small cell that guards the anchorite Frate Forte’s relics.