San Miniato al Monte, commonly referred to as just San Miniato, is a church in Florence. San Miniato sits atop a hill that gives its onlookers a beautiful view of all of Florence. Emperor Henry II endowed the construction of the church in 1013, and Bishop Alibrando started the construction. The church was built after the legend of St. Miniato, an Armenian prince who was in the Roman army. He became a hermit and was denounced as a Christian. The emperor at the time beheaded him, and the legend goes that he carried his head up the hill and back to his place of hermitage. A shrine was built on this hill to commemorate Miniato and later on, in the eighth century, a chapel. Today, the church is affiliated with the Benedictine order and run by monks. 

San Miniato is featured in the film Obsession, directed by Brian De Palma and produced in 1976.  Obsession utilizes the full beauty the church has to offer and films both inside and outside the church. San Miniato is essential to the film as it has symbolic meaning to the main character, is a church that gets mentioned throughout the movie, and a location that has two significant scenes filmed at it. These scenes are filmed both inside the church where Sandra  is working on a restoration project, and outside the church on the steps leading up to it where Micheal takes a picture of her. 

In the first scene, the main character, Micheal Courtland, sees a young woman working on a painting, Madonna and Child and is instantly captivated by her as she looks exactly like his late wife, Elizabeth. He immediately converses and with the young woman, Sandra,  and becomes obsessed with her, which turns into a  main storyline in the plot.  Another main scene in the film that utilizes San Miniatio is when Micheal recreates a photograph that he took of Elizabeth. He places Sandra in font of the church, almost exactly where Elizabeth was standing, and takes a photograph.  Both scenes depict a central theme of Micheal's obsession with recreating his new lover to be exactly like his late wife.  San Miniato,  and Florence as a whole, serve as the location where their creepy love story starts.