Tabernacolo dei Giustiziati - Certaldo Alto - Tuscany

The Tabernacle of the Executed is located outside the medieval wall circuit, along the Via Francigena, near the Agliena stream, which flows on the slopes of the hill on which Certaldo Alto stands.

The wall structure of the tabernacle dates from the sixties of the fifteenth century, when it was decorated by Benozzo Gozzoli and his workshop.

It was a painted tabernacle that had the function of offering the last consolation to those sentenced to death (hence the name): Certaldo had lived in Certaldo since 1415, a magistrate appointed by the Florentine Republic to administer justice. in the Valdelsa and Val di Pesa.

In the nineteenth century, a chapel leaned against the tabernacle with the function of protecting the frescoes from the weather.

The frescoes were detached in 1957 and reassembled in the former Church of Saints Thomas and Prospero in Certaldo Alto, part of the Praetorian Palace Museum Route.

Today the masonry has been demolished: three of the nineteenth-century chapels of the four were demolished in the 1970s by a clumsy truck maneuver.

willem vandenameele