Near by the Villa delle Selve, nestling amid elms and cypresses on a spur of the same hill, is the church of Le Selve adjoining a monastery of Carmelite friars suppressed, like so many others, by Napoleon I. The abbot’s rooms are now inhabited by the village priest and the monk’s garden, with a fine old well in the centre and surrounded by two-storied cloisters, has been turned into a nursery for olive trees. The church, said to have been restored by Buontalenti, possesses a nave of considerable height and beauty terminating in an apse and under the high altar is a small crypt where St Andrea Corsini celebrated his first mass. The young priest fled from the grand preparations made in Florence, and took refuge with the monks at Le Selve; when at daybreak trembling with religious fervour he raised the chalice to his lips a vision of Our Lady appeared to him; smiling graciously she bent her head and said _Tu est servus meus_. A miraculous crucifix is in the church, and every fifty years the _Festa_ of the Crucifix of Providence is celebrated in the month of April. Just before sunset the crucifix is borne out of the church followed by a long line of priests, little acolytes in snow-white robes and stalwart peasants dressed in their best carrying banners and canopies. The steep hill down to Ponte a Signa is all strewn with rose leaves, irises and sweet herbs, and the long procession winds down to the river and returns with flaring torches like a huge fiery serpent, creeping up the hill beneath the olives and cypresses when the stars come out. The peasants put candles in their windows and the stately villa, now the property of the Contessa Cappelli, becomes a blaze of light. [Illustration: (Drawing of three story Villa seen from garden)] FOOTNOTES: [77] See _Marietta de’ Ricci_. A. Ademollo. 2a Edizione con aggiunte di L. Passerini. Firenze, 1845. Vol. III. p. 816, and Vol. IV. p. 1216. [78] _Vita di Galileo Galilei._ G. B. Clemente de’ Nelli. Losanna, 1793. [Illustration: VILLA I COLLAZZI] [Illustration: (Drawing of two story villa with u-shaped colonnade, with a double stairway to garden)] VILLA I COLLAZZI