Castelfranco Piandiscò

The road that crosses this territory is called the Sette Ponti, the seven bridges, and the comune keeps more than one of them. At Castelfranco di Sopra there is the bridge of a Roman aqueduct; on the mule track that joins La Lama with Pulicciano there is a Roman bridge; and on the Faella torrent, ninety metres upstream of the bridge in use today, half a span still stands: it is all that is left of the Ponte a Mandri, which German soldiers blew up in reprisal in 1944. The comune, for that matter, is made of two: Castelfranco di Sopra and Pian di Scò, joined on the first of January 2014, with the town hall at Castelfranco.

From Castelfranco comes the badia di Soffena, that is the monastery of San Salvatore, whose oldest part goes back to the ninth century; and from it come the town gates, the Porta Fiorentina and the tower they call Arnolfo's, and a good number of tower-houses built by the Republic of Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at Giuncheto and at Borgo Mocale. From Pian di Scò comes the pieve of Santa Maria a Scò, whose origin is probably Etruscan. Higher up, on the hills, are the remains of the castle of Poggio alla Regina, where the first settlement was of the Bronze Age. The theatre of Castelfranco carries the name of an actress, Wanda Capodaglio. And the comune is on the list of the most beautiful villages in Italy.