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Surrounded by the green rocky walls of Monte Pisano, the pieve of Rigoli represents one of the most significant examples of the Pisan Romanesque on the territory. Pilgrims arriving at this place can see the pieve of Rigoli in its plain, majestic shapes: a three-nave building, with three apses and a huge bell tower on the front.

Surrounded by the green rocky walls of Monte Pisano, the pieve of Rigoli represents one of the most significant examples of the Pisan Romanesque on the territory. Pilgrims arriving at this place can see the pieve of Rigoli in its plain, majestic shapes: a three-nave building, with three apses and a huge bell tower on the front. The interior is marked by an austere simplicity; in the morning, the daylight filters through one-light windows and cruciform openings, conveying past atmospheres. The church interior guards a precious example of marble baptismal font. The church has got a basilical plan, with apsed nave and aisles. The nave is larger than the aisles and presents three single-light windows, through which the daylight starts filtering when the sun rises above the mountain. The façade has got three portals: the main one is surmounted by a lintel and a lunette with a marked horseshoe arch. No sculptural decorations are present. The two other portals consist of plain access openings, surmounted by lintels: an original one of trapezoidal form and another one, restored, of parallelepipedal shape. The campanile was raised onto the façade as an imposing brickwork tower, in the 18th century. The interior is uncommonly divided by two rows of stone piers, marking off the central space from the aisles. Different building techniques may be identified by means of a masonry analysis, revealing the phases underwent by the building throughout the centuries. The left side shows the earliest phase, whose construction technique, less specialized (called filaretto), employs limestone ashlars from Monte Pisano. On the contrary, the reconstruction (which may be attributed to the 12th century) is marked by the use of dimension stones coming from the limestone quarries of the nearby mountains, installed according to a perfect bricklaying technique. Tradition has it that the pieve of Rigoli rose in the 8th century, originally dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. Peter. The first two documents confirming its existence, though, date back to the year 922, when the bishop of Lucca exhorted the priest Leone to rebuild it from the foundations. After this reconstruction, the church was enlarged once more between the end of the 11th and the 12th centuries, when Pisa recovered the skill to square stones and build small architectural jewels. In the 15th century, Florentine troops conquered Rigoli and destroyed the bell tower of the pieve. In 1448, the pievano sold all of the building stones, except for a few ones, which he had walled around the cloister of his dwelling. Only in 1764 was the campanile reconstructed, thanks to the Company of the Holy Sacrament’s support. The new dedication of the building to Saint Mark was confirmed since the 16th century, when a pastoral visit imposed the restoration of the precarious roof. The church interior hosts a few significant works of art from the Middle Ages. Just past the entrance, in the left aisle, a wonderful immersion baptismal font of Lombard age dates between the 8th-9th centuries. Attributed to Lombard workers, it is a rectangular, box-type basin carved out of a single marble block, decorated with symbolic motifs. In the middle of its front side is a relief of a cross inscribed in a circle. Once, the building guarded a Virgin with Child and Angels by Turino Vanni, an important 14th-century painter from this village. The painting represented the central part of a polyptych placed on an altar under the patronage of the Alliata household. Today, the work is kept at the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa. Outside, the building presents an interesting sculptural repertoire, decorating the corbels of the Lombard bands running along the central apse. They depict the typical vegetal and anthropomorphic motifs spread in the whole territory by travelling workers during the Middle Ages. Both the church and the bell tower were restored several times throughout the centuries. The chronicler Sercambi left the earliest piece of news reporting a damage occurred when, in 1404, the Florentines besieged, seized and destroyed the bell tower of the pieve. For a long time, the church remained deprived of its bell tower, which would be rebuilt only in 1764, set against the church. Such addition to the right corner of the façade caused serious damage to the whole building, which required consolidation works on various occasions. The church also posed dampness and structural settlement problems, due to the water tables flowing underneath. In 1821, the pievano Sebastiano Del Punta started major restoration works in the church. On the occasion, he changed the liturgical fittings, had the wooden altar replaced by a Roman-style altar in brickwork, stone and plaster, purchased new pictures, had more altars built and placed along the church; finally, he had a pipe organ installed above the main door. Around the baptismal font, a neo-Gothic small temple was also built, by now got lost.

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