Monte San Savino

In 1222 Monte San Savino governed itself as a republic, with a senator and four consuls. In the fourteenth century its going over to the side of Florence angered the Tarlati of Arezzo, who punished the town: the citizens took refuge on the hill of the Vertighe and, when they came back, in 1337, they redrew the place in the shape of a spindle — which is still the shape of the old centre. Florence took it for good in 1384. In the fifteenth century the Ciocchi del Monte family rose: first with Antonio, who became a cardinal and was the patron of Andrea Sansovino, the sculptor born here, then with his nephew Giovanni Maria, elected pope with the name of Julius III. To honour the event Florence granted Monte San Savino as a county to the pope's brother, and the family rebuilt the town: the palace and, in front of it, the merchants' loggias in pietra serena.

In 1627 a Jewish community settled here, with the Passigli family, and it lasted nearly two centuries: what remains are traces of the ghetto, the building of the synagogue, the cemetery and a permanent exhibition on this history. In 1799, during the Viva Maria rising, the community was driven out; it came back in 1814, with the end of the Napoleonic regime. The coat of arms is a canting one: a mount and two branches of savinia. Since at least 1471 a joust was run here on the fifteenth of August, the Palio savinese. In the church of Sant'Agostino, which Sansovino himself reworked, there is an Assumption by Giorgio Vasari. And the workshops still work ceramics with techniques generations old.