“Sacred and profane” is a Montalcino that also tells of heretics, saints and blessed. Like Giovanni Moglio, a Franciscan friar of the Convent of San Francesco, born in the city in the early sixteenth century, who paid with his life for his preaching to the common people. In contrast to the intermediation between man and God proposed by the Roman Church, he was inspired by early Christianity. Thus, he was suspected of heresy in Rome by the newly established Inquisition Office and the first to be publicly judged. On September 4th 1553, he was hanged and burned at the stake in Campo de’Fiori, where Giordano Bruno died half a century later. A few years earlier, in 1516 in Florence, Pope Leo X sanctified among the Church’s martyrs those Franciscan missionaries who, on 10 October 1227, after a long period of torture, were beheaded by the Saracens in Ceuta, Morocco, guilty of preaching the Gospel. Among these, there was also a monk from Montalcino: San Donnolo Donnoli. Two of the most important streets of the city are dedicated to each of them.
Walking through the streets, you arrive at their Church and Convent of San Francesco, in which it is said that the relics of Blessed Filippino Ciardelli, companion of St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis, were kept. He was known for the intensity of his mystical asceticism and the healings performed in life and post mortem, and of which the Franciscan propaganda claimed the local origins. In the polyptych “Deposition of Christ from the cross”, one of the most important works on display in the Montalcino Museums, Bartolo di Fredi, a renowned artist from the 14th-century Sienese school, depicts the life of an ascetic, the ecstasies in the woods, and the miracles witnessed by his Franciscan companions and the city’s inhabitants.
