St Stefano's Parish

A few kilometers from La Verna, in a valley in the silence of the mountains, rises Pieve Santo Stefano. The town was destroyed in 1944 and quickly rebuilt after the war, has lost its architectural structure of the village retaining only some traces of its ancient history. Among the most valuable evidence of the past, we find at the south entrance of the village church of the Madonna dei Lumi, built in the sixteenth century in honor of the Virgin that had been granted to citizens of Pieve many miraculous actions. The interior of the Church, in late Renaissance style, is embellished with frescoes by Luigi Ademollo. Even today the celebration of the Madonna dei Lumi, on 8 September each year, is the most important festival of the city and is characterized by a procession and the Luce Games organized by the various districts. Entering the inner city is the sixteenth-century Praetorian Palace, where rooms in a terracotta by Girolamo Della Robbia "The Samaritan Woman at the Well" before the entrance welcomes the visitor to discover the treasures of the Archives manuscript diary. Parish is in fact known as the "city of the diary" with its rich and original collection of notebooks in the trenches of war, love letters from past centuries, diaries of young people locked with a padlock, tales of migrants, secrets entrusted to pages notebooks. Of particular fascination is also the Collegiate Church of Santo Stefano, in which, a Latin cross, you can enjoy a pottery workshop of Andrea della Robbia depicting the Assumption of the Madonna between Saints.