On 29 June 1440 the plain below Anghiari was the scene of the battle that bears its name: on one side the Florentine army, allied to the Holy See and commanded by Giovanni Paolo Orsini, on the other that of the duke of Milan, led by Niccolò Piccinino. It lasted a single day and the Florentines won it, consolidating their dominions in Tuscany. To celebrate, it was decided to remember it with a palio run by men on foot, from the place where the battle had happened; and in 1441 the chapel of Santa Maria alla Vittoria was raised on the straight road that runs towards Sansepolcro. In 1503 the Signoria of Florence, with the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini, asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint that battle in the Sala del Consiglio of Palazzo Vecchio: the drying process Leonardo wanted to try destroyed much of the work, and of that painting there remain some of his drawings and some copies of the central group, the fight for the standard, the best known of them being that of Rubens, in the Louvre.
The town is built on a mass of gravel that the Tiber piled up over millennia, and some read its name exactly so, in glarea; others take it from castrum angolare, for the angular shape of the castle. That castle is first named in a document of 1048; and in 1104 Bernardino di Sidonia, lord of Anghiari, gave the place to the Camaldolese with the obligation to found an abbey there, San Bartolomeo: the settlement grew around it, and from 1104 to 1143 Camaldoli was absolute master of the whole area. The community freed itself little by little by creating its own magistracies and drew close to Arezzo, which destroyed the castle in 1175; the borgo was at once rebuilt with a new circle of walls. In 1385 Anghiari passed to Florence, and to its arms was added the red lily. In the last war the fascist regime set up here the internment camp of Renicci, for civilians from what is now the former Yugoslavia: it worked from October 1942 to September 1943, and of the more than 500 people interned about 160 died. The town was evacuated by the Germans in the night between 28 and 29 July 1944 and liberated on the evening of the 29th by the vanguard of the Punjabi troops.
Bistecca alla Fiorentina
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Next up: The Most Holy Crucifix and Saint Bartholomew, patrons of the Palio della Vittoria, Monday 3 May
Nearest airport: Perugia San Francesco, 62 km away
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📅 Every year, on 3 May, with the Palio della Vittoria, run since 1441
Anghiari celebrates the Most Holy Crucifix and Saint Bartholomew on 3 May, with the Festa del Santissimo Crocifisso. The Palio della Vittoria, one of the oldest in Tuscany, was established by the Florentines to celebrate the battle of 29 June 1440 and has been run since 1441.
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