Foiano della Chiana

In 1084 Foiano was the first community of the Valdichiana to give itself a statute and proclaim itself a free and independent comune. What made it strong was the marsh: it stood on a low hill surrounded by water on three sides, and it was the best defensive point in the whole valley. It was also very nearly an island — the Florentines built a port here, and from the statutes of Cortona one gathers that to reach the neighbouring villages of Castiglion Aretino and Cortona you had to go by boat. Florence stormed Foiano in the fourteenth century and razed it almost to the ground, then rebuilt it, and above all rebuilt its walls, because the Aretines kept trying to take it back.

In 1502 Leonardo da Vinci came here and began to study the draining of the Valdichiana, drawing the map of the valley that everybody knows. In 1525 Foiano was the first comune to hand its marshes over to the Medici to be drained; the work went on for three centuries, passing through Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Baldassarre Peruzzi and Vignola, and was finished under the Lorraine, when in 1788 Pietro Leopoldo put Vittorio Fossombroni in charge of it. Fossombroni worked at it for forty years, and when he retired, in 1828, a chronicler wrote down what he had noticed: in the cleaned air the swifts had come back to Foiano. Long before, in 1554, in what is today a hamlet of the comune, the battle of Scannagallo had been fought, where the Florentines routed the Sienese and opened their road to Siena. And in April 1921, at a place called Renzino, a group of peasants ambushed a lorryload of squadristi and killed three of them: the reprisal that followed cost other lives, in the town and in the fields.