Subbiano

Two explanations run about the name, and the finer one is not the right one. The first derives it from Sub Jano conditum, «built in the time of Janus»; the second, which the sources hold more reliable, places it among the many names in -ano formed on the name of the owner of the land: the Roman family name Sevius, corrupted into Suvius, would have given vicus Suvianum and then Subbiano. In the same comune the mechanism repeats: Valenzano comes from Valentius, that is vicus Valentianum. The village is the first of the Casentino you meet going up the Arno on the left bank, a dozen kilometres from Arezzo, below the Alpe di Catenaia, where the oldest finds run from the third to the first millennium before Christ.

The castle of Valenzano has a medieval history and a nineteenth-century face. Raised on a Roman settlement, it is recorded in the 11th century as a possession of the Ubertini, then passes to the Tarlati di Pietramala and in 1385 submits to Florence; in 1870 the Bastogi counts had it entirely rebuilt in neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic forms, and that is what one sees today. In the cemetery the Lapini chapel is painted with frescoes by Galileo Chini. The Arezzo-Stia railway crosses the comune with three stops, Subbiano, Calbenzano and Santa Mama, and at Santa Mama the church of San Mamante keeps an altarpiece by Bernardino Santini, of about 1645, with the Virgin between Saints Francis and Mamas.