Capolona

Capolona is not so much a village as a name that has walked about its own territory. It comes from Campus Leonis, or Caput Leonis, and belonged to the abbey of San Gennaro at Campoleone, founded in 972 and later entrusted to Benedictine monks come from Montecassino: between the tenth and the twelfth century the list of its properties was enormous, castles and courts from the Casentino to Umbria, and in September 1064 pope Alexander II stayed there. From the end of the fourteenth century the abbey declined and was abandoned, and with it decayed the settlement around it; the territory was then joined to other communities, above all to Subbiano, on the other bank of the Arno. In 1808 the district of Capolona, Bibbiano and Belfiore was set up, with its seat at Castelluccio, the place nearest the old abbey, which took its name; and before that the name had passed to another spot, the seat of the pieve of San Giovanni, until then called Sulpiciano. More recently it has moved again, onto the buildings that grew at the foot of Caliano, by the bridge over the Arno, around the Soldini brothers' shoe factory put up at the end of the fifties.

The chief monument is the Pieve a Sietina, which has come down to us almost in its original form — the bell tower is of the early twentieth century — and is recorded from the beginning of the eleventh century under the name of Santa Maria Maddalena di Setrina. It stands in what the documents call the terra barbaritana: so they named a wide area between Arezzo and the Casentino where, around the year one thousand, the mark of the Germanic peoples who had settled there in past centuries was still strong. Inside are fourteenth-century and Renaissance frescoes, brought back to light by a recent restoration. Around it the villages keep their medieval shape: Castelluccio with its Portaccia, Bibbiano with well-preserved stretches of wall, Pieve di Cenina, Pieve San Martino Sopr'Arno, Pieve San Giovanni; and at Lorenzano, Casella, Caliano and Belfiore there remain traces of what must have been an early medieval defensive system. On the third weekend of July Castelluccio holds a historical re-enactment, and it is called Campus Leonis, from the old name of the whole thing.