Santa Marta, Montopoli in Val d'Arno

Santa Marta refers a church and its associated former Roman Catholic monastery, now a conservatorio or school, located on Via del Falcone #30 in the urban center of Montopoli in Val d'Arno, in the province of Pisa, region of Tuscany, Italy.

For a few years prior to his death in 1595, the rich local merchant Sebastiano Ganucci, who had no male heirs, meticulously planned to endow his daughter, Suor Artenia at a monastery in Pisa, as the abbess of a sustainable cloistered Augustinian convent.

Their replacements, with the help of Simone, the widow of Ganucci, argued with the Pisan Bishop, among other points, that all of Montopoli was a walled town, hence apt for a monastery.

Ultimately the monastery received a papal bull of approval by Pope Paul V.[6] A belltower was built in 1657, and the church was completed in 1677, and consecrated in 1697.

Stripped of the religious affiliation by the French invasion, the convent was briefly refounded as a school by Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Lorraine.

Interior