★ Town · Arezzo, Casentino and ValdichianaAnghiariA compact medieval village on a hill in the Valtiberina, with walls, stone alleys and a perfectly straight road running down towards Sansepolcro.
The storyOn 29 June 1440, on the plain below the village, the army of Florence and the Pope defeated the Milanese troops of the Visconti. Sixty years later the Florentine Republic asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint the battle in the great hall of Palazzo Vecchio: Leonardo began it in 1505 but never finished it, and the work was lost beneath later alterations. Some people are still looking for it behind Vasari's frescoes.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Arezzo, Casentino and ValdichianaPoppiAn arcaded village on top of a hill in the Casentino, dominated by the castle of the Guidi counts, which looks like a small-scale Palazzo Vecchio.
The storyOn 11 June 1289, on the Campaldino plain below Poppi, the Guelphs of Florence defeated the Ghibellines of Arezzo in one of the bloodiest battles of medieval Tuscany. Among the Florentine knights in the front line was a young Dante Alighieri, who writes about it in the Purgatorio. The castle holds the Rilliana library, with manuscripts and early printed books.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Lucca, Versilia, Garfagnana and LunigianaBargaA hillside town in the Serchio valley, with a Romanesque cathedral at the top looking out to the Apuan Alps, and the home of the poet Giovanni Pascoli close by.
The storyBetween the late 19th and the 20th century thousands of people from the valley emigrated to Scotland, especially Glasgow, opening ice-cream parlours and fish-and-chip shops. Many came back or kept their ties: that's why Barga is called “the most Scottish town in Italy”, in summer it holds a fish-and-chips festival and you can hear English spoken with a Scottish accent in its streets. Giovanni Pascoli lived in nearby Castelvecchio from 1895 until his death.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Lucca, Versilia, Garfagnana and LunigianaPontremoliThe main town of the Lunigiana, Tuscany's northernmost corner, squeezed between two rivers on the Via Francigena, with the Piagnaro castle above its rooftops.
The storyThe castle displays the stele statues of the Lunigiana, stone figures of warriors and women carved between the 4th and the 1st millennium BC, as mysterious as anything in Italy. Pontremoli is also the town of booksellers: itinerant book pedlars set out from the mountain villages around it, and in 1953 the Bancarella Prize was created in their honour, awarded by booksellers themselves (the first went to Hemingway for “The Old Man and the Sea”).
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Maremma, Tufa Area and ArgentarioSoranoA single brick-paved street, a medieval square, a Romanesque cathedral at the end of the village: Sovana is a tiny village in the land of tufa.
The storyHildebrand of Sovana was born here in the 11th century; he became Pope Gregory VII and challenged Emperor Henry IV in the Investiture Controversy. Around the village the Etruscans carved monumental tombs into the tufa, such as the temple-shaped Tomba Ildebranda, and the “vie cave”: sunken roads cut between rock walls up to twenty metres high, whose purpose is still not known for certain.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Siena, Crete and Val d'OrciaSan Quirico d'OrciaA tiny village in the Val d'Orcia where instead of a square there is a large pool of steaming thermal water, surrounded by stone houses.
The storyThe Renaissance pool collects hot water that rises from underground and was already used in Roman times; Saint Catherine of Siena and Lorenzo the Magnificent came here to take the cure. In 1983 the director Andrei Tarkovsky shot the most famous scenes of his film “Nostalghia” here. Today you can't bathe in the pool, but the water still runs down the channels of the old mills.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Lucca, Versilia, Garfagnana and LunigianaCarraraA quarrymen's village in the heart of the Apuan marble quarries above Carrara, famous for lardo cured in marble basins.
The storyAccording to tradition the village began as a colony of slaves the Romans sent to quarry marble, hence its name. Lardo di Colonnata has been cured here for centuries: layers of pork fat, salt, pepper and rosemary sealed for months in marble “conche” inside cool cellars. It was the quarrymen's energy food; today it is a PGI product. The marble Michelangelo chose for his sculptures came from these same mountains.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Town · Pisa, Volterra and the Metalliferous HillsMassa MarittimaA medieval town in the Metalliferous Hills, with one of the most beautiful squares in Tuscany and the cathedral of San Cerbone at the top of a flight of steps.
The storyIn 1999, while the Fonte dell'Abbondanza, the town's 13th-century public fountain, was being restored, a fresco nobody remembered emerged from under the grime: a tree hung with dozens of phalluses, with women gathering them. It is the “Tree of Fertility”, a medieval image still debated: an allegory of fertility, political satire or a good-luck charm for the town's water. Massa's wealth came from its silver and copper mines, told in the museum of mining art and history.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Nature · Arezzo, Casentino and ValdichianaCastelfranco PiandiscòPinnacles and cliffs of sand and clay up to about a hundred metres high, sculpted by the rain between Castelfranco di Sopra, Piandiscò and Terranuova Bracciolini.
The storyThey are the sediments of an ancient lake that filled the Valdarno millions of years ago, later eroded into canyon-like shapes. Fossils of elephants, hippos and sabre-toothed cats have been found nearby. Some scholars believe Leonardo da Vinci, who knew the valley well, drew on these shapes for the rocky backgrounds of some of his paintings.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Nature · Pisa, Volterra and the Metalliferous HillsPomaranceA valley in the Metalliferous Hills where steam vents burst from the ground, pools bubble and big silver pipes snake through the woods.
The storyIn the 19th century the French entrepreneur François de Larderel, after whom the village is named, began extracting boric acid from the steaming pools. On 4 July 1904 Prince Piero Ginori Conti lit a few light bulbs here using steam power: it was the first time in the world that the Earth's heat produced electricity. A few years later the first geothermal power station was built, and the area still produces much of Italy's geothermal energy. Tradition has it that the smoking landscape inspired Dante's Inferno.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ Beach · Etruscan Coast and ElbaPiombinoA crescent-shaped bay with dark sand, a pine wood and Etruscan tombs a few steps from the beach, below the medieval village of Populonia.
The storyPopulonia was the only major Etruscan city built right on the sea. Here the Etruscans smelted iron ore mined on Elba, and over the centuries the slag piled up until it buried the necropolis. Only in the 20th century, when people began reusing that still iron-rich slag, did the mound and aedicule tombs re-emerge. That's why the sand at Baratti still has dark, metallic glints.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · Siena, Crete and Val d'OrciaChiusdinoA large roofless Gothic abbey, with the sky in place of its vaults, and on the hill beside it a Romanesque rotunda with a sword thrust into the rock.
The storyGalgano Guidotti was a knight from Chiusdino who led a violent life. In 1180, according to tradition, on the hill of Montesiepi he thrust his sword into the rock to make a cross and become a hermit; he died the following year and was made a saint. The rotunda was built over his tomb, and below it Cistercian monks built the abbey, abandoned over the centuries and collapsed in the 18th century. Analysis of the metal has confirmed that the sword is medieval.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · Siena, Crete and Val d'OrciaAscianoA red-brick monastery surrounded by cypresses amid the clay hills of the Crete Senesi, still home to Benedictine monks.
The storyIt was founded in 1313 by Bernardo Tolomei, a Sienese nobleman who withdrew here to live as a hermit. The great cloister is frescoed with the life of Saint Benedict by Luca Signorelli and Sodoma, who between 1505 and 1508 also painted his own portrait with his favourite animals at his feet: two badgers. The monks called him “il Mattaccio” (the madcap) for his eccentricities.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · Pisa, Volterra and the Metalliferous HillsCalciA huge Baroque charterhouse at the foot of Monte Pisano, a quarter of an hour from Pisa, with cloisters, monks' cells and frescoed churches.
The storyIt was founded in 1366 and remained an enclosed monastery until 1972. Today half the complex houses the University of Pisa's Natural History Museum, born from the Medici collections: the cetacean gallery, with whale skeletons hanging above visitors' heads, is one of the largest in Europe.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · Maremma, Tufa Area and ArgentarioCapalbioA park of gigantic sculptures covered in mirrors, glass and coloured ceramics, on the Maremma hills near Capalbio.
The storyThe French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, struck by Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona, set out to build a garden devoted to the twenty-two major arcana of the tarot. She began in 1979 and worked on it for almost twenty years with local craftsmen; for long periods she lived inside one of the sculptures, the Empress, which contained her home. The garden opened to the public in 1998.
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