Bucine

Until the nineteen nineties Bucine was one of the largest centres in the world for the export of heather brooms. Then synthetic materials arrived and the market shrank, although some firms here still work heather and sell it. Of that trade a vocabulary also survives: the brooms of Bucine were made flat, or round, or hare's foot — and the hare's foot ones were the brooms for sweeping the streets. The comune is unusually large for a Tuscan one, and there is a reason: in the French period the old podesteria of Bucine Valdambra was rebuilt within its original boundaries, which took in a territory of fully twenty-four comuni, and the present comune has broadly kept that shape. It holds the gold medal for civil valour, for acts of abnegation during the last war.

The Ambra comes down here from the last hills of the Chianti towards the upper valley of the Arno, and people have been passing this way since Roman times: the bridge of Pogi is still in its place. In the Middle Ages the valley was shared out among lords — the Guidi counts of Modigliana held Bucine, Pogi, Galatrona and other castles, which in 1208 were organised under a Statute of the Val d'Ambra and in 1225 placed under the protection of Arezzo; the Ubertini held the upper valley; an abbey had jurisdiction over three more places. Around 1325 the Tarlati of Arezzo wrested the castle of Bucine from the Guidi by force of arms, and from 1335 Florence began taking the whole valley, an annexation sanctioned by the treaty of Sarzana in 1353. Much later, in 1645, Ferdinando the second de' Medici erected the comune into a fief and made it a marquisate for the Vitelli, whose descendants held it until 1778.