Church of the Most Holy Annunciation

The Church of the Most Holy Annunciation, arranged longitudinally relative to the square, today occupies a large part of the hospital's façade. Numerous interventions and transformations have marked its history, as have the furnishings and works commissioned for it, those still preserved within its structure, as well as those of which traces remain in the rich hospital documentation or in the iconographic tradition. The first evidence of its construction dates back to 1257, the year in which Pope Alexander IV granted the hospital permission to build a chapel and the Bishop of Siena, Bonfiglio, confirmed to the rector of Santa Maria della Scala the possibility of erecting an 'ecclesiam sive oratorium'. The first place of worship was not actually built ex novo, but is likely to be identified with the space characterized by the limestone cladding on the façade, originally intended as the initial reception area. By the mid-13th century this function was moved to the interior of the building, toward the valley behind. Initially more likely an oratory, its transformation into a church occurred between the late 13th century and the mid-14th century. Inside it, sources attest to the presence of numerous chapels created by noble families and rectors; important members of the hospital community or of distinguished noble families were also buried there. On the exterior façade, in 1335 Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti together with Simone Martini were commissioned to paint the 'Stories of the Virgin', now lost, having been erased in 1720, after the removal of the protective canopy, under a layer of plaster by the will of the rector Antonio Ugolini Billò. In 1362, with the arrival of the relics, a marble pulpit topped by a pergola was erected on the church façade, from which the relics were shown to the population; it had already disappeared by the early 18th century, when Girolamo Macchi depicted it in the famous drawing of the hospital's façade.