Piansano

Piansano was the Castrum Planzani, in the orbit of Tuscania, and it was fought over by a good many of the lordships of its day, while the Church never stopped trying to take possession of it. In the sixteen hundreds it passed for good under the Holy See, and it met the same fate as other territories in the area: it was rented out as a fief to one lord after another. The village stands on ground crossed by the Arrone torrent and is divided into quarters — the old centre they call La Rocca, or le Capannelle among the younger people, where there is a church of the fifteen hundreds; the centre proper, with the main square; and outside the built-up area the place called Marinello.

In 1790 the Papal State granted the little village to count Alessandro Cardarelli. In 1808 the Apostolic Chamber sold the fief to a Polish prince, Stanisław Poniatowski, who had moved from Rome to Florence and who resold it in 1822 to count Giuseppe Cini. Cini remained sole owner until 1897, when he put it up for auction, and the fief was knocked down to the Monte dei Paschi di Siena: for a dozen years a village belonged to a Tuscan bank. In 1909 the bank put it on the market and it was bought by several buyers. Then, after the first world war, the fief, by now split up, was expropriated by the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, which assigned it to the men who had come back from the Great War. Since 2011 there has been a wind farm on this land. The patron is San Bernardino, and his feast falls on the twentieth of May.