Terranuova Bracciolini

This town was designed. The Florentine Republic founded it in 1337 as one of the walled towns built to defend the Valdarno, that is as a military instrument drawn before it was inhabited, and called it Castel Santa Maria. Five centuries later, in 1862, it changed its name for the second time, and this time took not a saint's but a man's: Poggio Bracciolini, the humanist born here, one of the most encyclopaedic scholars of his century. From a fortress named after the Madonna to a town named after a man of letters, with the whole history of humanism in between. The municipal territory runs down from the floor of the Arno valley to the hills, where the landscape is marked by the balze, the badlands that erosion has carved in the clay.

The town's calendar keeps some old things and has lost others. The Festa del Perdono, the greatest fair of the Valdarno, has origins going back to 1615 and is still held every year on the fourth weekend of September; on the following Monday comes the national bird fair. The Procession of the Dead Christ, on the other hand, which was of ancient tradition, is today celebrated only once every seven years. And the Infiorata of Corpus Christi has ended altogether: the last was made in 1965. Gone too is the electric tramway that for some twenty years linked Terranuova to Montevarchi and came to carry more than one million three hundred thousand passengers a year. The church of Santa Maria Nuova, by contrast, is very recent: Mario Botta designed it taking his inspiration from Jacob's ladder, and into it was brought a crucifix of the early fourteenth century.