ABSTRACT
Sant ’Andeea in Percussina is a little village set on the old Roman postal road, 1 seven miles from Florence and two from San Casciano. A small parish church, a house used as an inn, and close beside it a ‘great house’ as it was then called, but which would be better described as a poor man’s house; a bit of open tower with various hovels built up against it, and others across the road used as oil-press, bakehouse, cowshed and stable; a poor farmhouse inhabited by peasants who work the farm: these houses, these hovels and this farm, called Borgo or Strada, together with another farm called the Poggio and the lands of Montepugliano and Fontalle, form the little kingdom of the Florentine Secretary, now become a countryman and his own farm bailiff. The ‘great house’ is called the Albergaccio after the inn which stands beside it, and this name ‘the wretched inn’ tells us all we need to know about the quality of both of them. To the west, on the right-hand side of the road which leads to San Casciano, he owns only a few pieces of land: all his property, vineyards, olive groves and woodland, runs down the southern slope from the little village to the stream called the Greve, which can be seen right at the bottom of the valley with so little water in it in the summer that it shows a skeleton of white stones.
