Bibbiena

Bibbiena chose the wrong side and paid for it twice. In the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines it stood with the Ghibellines of Arezzo, and after the defeat at Campaldino the Florentines came to lay waste the market place and the old pieve, which was ruined for good; the people shut themselves in the castle and held out eight days before the town was taken and sacked. Two centuries later it happened again: in 1498 the town became the headquarters of the Venetians under the duke of Urbino and the refuge of the exiled Piero and Giovanni de' Medici, and when Florence took it back, in 1509, it had its walls dismantled. Today only a few remains of those walls survive. Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi, born here and secretary to Giovanni de' Medici, went down in history under the name of his own town: he was called simply il Bibbiena.

The town has a recent vocation and a surprise. The vocation is photography: the former district prison houses the Italian Centre of Author Photography, which preserves contemporary photographic archives; every summer the Festival of Italian Photography is held; and in the streets of the old centre there is the first permanent open-air photographic gallery in Italy; since 2023 a regional law has granted Bibbiena the title of Tuscan city of photography. The surprise, instead, is in a technical school: there is kept the only surviving Olivetti Elea 9003 still in partial working order. The machine had belonged to a bank, which gave it to the school so that it might be used for teaching; taking it apart and putting it back together in its new home was the work of a team of technicians. At the plebiscite of 1860, meanwhile, the yes votes here did not reach a majority of those entitled to vote.