These old archival photos show the Church Of The Holy Spirit in the village of Indicatore, a few miles from Arezzo in Tuscany. The religious building, constructed on a plot of land located between the railroad and the State Road n.69, was consecrated in 1965.

 

The church was built to provide a cultural focus for the village of Indicatore. Different from nearby villages, Indicatore didn't have a church because until after WWII the place was similar to what in the past would have been called a coaching inn. The village, located at the crossroads between two main thoroughfares that branched off from the Valdarno (North) to Arezzo (Southwest) and the Valdichiana (Southeast), originally consisted of a few stone houses with small shops on their ground floors and few modest homes in the nearby countryside. In the official documents of the Municipality of Arezzo, the inhabitants were, until the Forties, identified as residents at The Column of the Indicator. The column, also called the Lorreinese Column, consists of a stone block of sandstone with a iron metal indicator on top, and two large directional arrows with the inscriptions "Arezzo" on one side and "Valdichiana" on the other. It is the only historical monument in the village. The directional column was erected where it stands today in the mid XIX c.in accordance with the will of Leopold II of Lorraine, Grand Duke of Tuscany. This was a continuation of the modernisation of the roads of the Grand Duchy, begun fifty years before by the illuminist king Pieter Leopold. 

Starting from the mid XIX c., well before modern road signs and GPS devices appeared, the directional arrows of the Lorreinese column indicated to travelers the directions to the Arezzo valleys.

 

Indicatore began to take the shape of a village in the Fifties. The depopulation of the countryside and migrations from the South of Italy are the two factors that contributed most to the explosion of the population of Indicatore in the decades following WWII. These were the years of the economic boom when people who could find a job were also capable of saving enough money to purchase a house or a condo. In Indicatore there were many plots of land that could be used to build new homes. At first, new shops appeared, providing the residents with the goods they needed. Not long after, there arose a desire to give to the residents a local place of culture. By 1965, when the Church of The Holy Spirit was consecrated, the population had exceded  that of nearby villages.

More recently, in the Nineties, the two first waves of European migration were replaced by migrations from other countries, further contributing to the town's growth. By the 2000s the village numbered over 3000 inhabitants.