Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

This comune is in Romagna, but until 1923 it belonged to the province of Florence: it is part of what is still called the Romagna toscana, the strip of Romagna that was Tuscan land for centuries. That is why Terra del Sole exists: Cosimo I de' Medici had it built in the fifteen hundreds as a fortified frontier town, and the captains of justice sat in these parts — at Castrocaro from 1403 to 1579, when it was the capital of the Florentine Romagna. The archive of criminal sources is still kept in one of the castles of Terra del Sole. The fortress of Castrocaro is among the oldest in Italy: it appears in a document of 961, when a king of Saxony stopped at that Castro Aukario.

The arms of the comune have been rewritten more often than almost any others. They began with the blue lion of the Pagani family, in 1080; then came a red cross; then a black crowned eagle, by a privilege of Frederick Barbarossa; then, by the privilege of another emperor, a green palm branch in the eagle's beak; then a golden lion. When the castle passed to Florence the arms were repainted in Florentine colours, and the Medici added their six balls and a ducal crown. Today they are cut in two: on one side the red cross, which stands for the Romagna toscana, on the other a radiant sun, which is simply the name of Terra del Sole. The other thing here is water: the curative properties of the springs were demonstrated in the eighteen thirties, the spa establishment was begun in 1887, and in the nineteen thirties they built a Grand Hotel that is one of the jewels of Italian Déco.