Poppi is built in the shape of an L, and its two poles are the castle of the Guidi counts at one end and the abbey of San Fedele at the other. The Guidi held it from 1191 to 1440, when it became the seat of the vicar of the Florentine Republic, and it is they who gave it that shape: in 1200 count Simone Guidi di Battifolle began turning the keep into a lordly residence, and in 1261 he had the ring of walls built with five gates, today reduced to four. Dante Alighieri stayed in the castle, in 1307 and again in 1311. Outside the walls, towards the plain, a column marks the field of the battle of Campaldino, and beside it stands the convent of Certomondo.
In the town, in Palazzo Crudeli, Tommaso Crudeli was born and died. He belonged to the first Masonic lodge in Italy, founded in 1732 by the English colony in Florence; the Church condemned him as a heretic, and after prison and torture he died in the family house, which now holds a museum on his trial and on human rights. Villa Ascensione, built in the 16th century as a Capuchin convent on a nearby hill, was turned at the beginning of 1942 into a prison camp for Allied officers captured in Africa, most of them New Zealanders: at the fall of fascism, in the summer of 1943, they left the camp and took shelter in the convents of La Verna and Camaldoli, and most of them then reached the Adriatic and the South.
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📅 Every year, on 16 March, in memory of the blessed hermit who tamed wolves
Poppi celebrates Blessed Torello da Poppi on 16 March. Living as a hermit in the 13th century on the Pratomagno, he is known for the miracle of taming a wolf that was about to devour a child.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
