Civitella in Val di Chiana

The village still keeps, in the line of its walls, the elliptical shape that Lombard military settlements had in the sixth and seventh centuries: it is one of the most readable fortresses of that network, and inside it there was later a castle of the bishops of Arezzo, who left it for a long while the name of Civitella del Vescovo. The town hall, though, is not here: in 1917, with the mountain emptying out, it was moved to the largest hamlet, Badia al Pino, and the comune kept the name of the old borgo all the same, out of gratitude. In 1940 an internment camp was opened at villa Oliveto, and through it passed above all Jewish families of British nationality who had come from Libya; after the German occupation they were deported, in February 1944, to Bergen-Belsen. In the same months the Wehrmacht made the castle its command post, an Allied bombing half destroyed it, and it has never been rebuilt.

On 29 June 1944 two hundred and forty-four people of Civitella were killed by soldiers of the Hermann Göring division, in reprisal for two Germans killed by partisans. In 1963 the town received the gold medal for civil valour. In 2006 an Italian military court convicted a German officer for this massacre and for the one at San Pancrazio; in 2008 the Court of Cassation ruled that Germany had to compensate two hundred and three victims; then the International Court of Justice ruled that Italy had to void that judgment, because of the immunity of states. Every year, on the anniversary, a march for peace goes from Civitella to San Pancrazio together with the comune of Bucine. And in the village cemetery lies the Scottish writer Muriel Spark.