Sant'Agata, Romanesque church in Sant'Agata di Mugello, Italy

Sant'Agata is a Romanesque church whose facade of Alberese limestone, sandstone and green serpentine has a gabled profile that hides the three-aisled interior. Inside, six tall Alberese columns with serpentine inserts carry a broad wooden truss roof without vaults, and the floor traces the perimeter of an earlier church rotated by 30 degrees.

A church existed here by 984, built between the 7th and 9th centuries; its perimeter is traced on the floor near the entrance, and remains beneath the pavement may date to the 4th-5th century. The present building was rebuilt in the 12th century, probably in its third quarter, and 1175 is carved on a panel of the old pulpit. A new apse replaced the semicircular one in the 15th century. Earthquakes struck in 1542 and 1611, and between 1608 and 1611 the pievano Tolomeo Nozzolini plastered the interior and exterior, lowered the presbytery and dismantled the old pulpit and marble enclosure.

The name comes from the relic bust of Saint Agatha kept on the counter-facade altar, whose upper structure reuses columns from the dismantled 1175 pulpit. Around the bust, the parish priest Tolomeo Nozzolini arranged scattered painted panels in the early 1600s, including a Saint Lucy and a Saint Agatha attributed to Jacopo di Cione from the 1383 polyptych of the Compagnia della Visitazione, and a Saint Catherine of Alexandria ascribed to Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni.

The church stands in Sant'Agata di Mugello, a hamlet of Scarperia e San Piero. On the floor near the entrance, a traced perimeter marks the smaller earlier church, rotated about 30 degrees; excavations in the 1960s revealed it. Look for the 1175 date carved on a panel of the old pulpit, now reused in the reliquary altar.

On the left flank, a checkerboard inlay of green serpentine and white Alberese echoes the marble two-tone of Florentine churches, while a fragmentary brick line above it may mark a portico built after the 1542 earthquake.