Barberino di Mugello

While they were building the Bilancino reservoir, in August 1990, the archaeologists of Scarperia noticed worked flint in the spoil, and the excavation that followed brought out an open-air camp of about thirty thousand years ago, on a terrace of the Sieve near where the Stura joins it. Something like forty-three thousand pieces of stone were collected. The settlement was not permanent but seasonal, a summer place; yet the tools were burins, which are no use for hunting. That detail, together with the marsh vegetation growing round about, pointed to something else: a group working those plants, to weave mats and hurdles and containers, ropes, coverings, huts. And it pointed to something more. The bulrush, the plant that grows in shallow fresh water, can be ground: its flour, mixed with water, flattened out and cooked, makes a flatbread. Which means that here people were not only gathering wild plants to eat as they were, but making from them a constructed food, through a series of operations that needed tools of their own.

The valley of the Mugello was a closed basin, and in the Tertiary era a lake stood in it; the lake emptied when its southern barrier was cut through and the water found its way to the Arno. What is left of that time is what lies in the ground: the seams of lignite, mined here for years, and the fossils — among them a rib that Niccolai took for a whale's, and which is probably the one set into the front of a house in the hamlet of Cafaggiolo. The Sieve is born in this comune, at Montecuccoli, and runs fifty-eight kilometres before entering the Arno at Pontassieve; its basin has always been the place where Florence went looking for water, and at the end of the twentieth century they dammed it and made the lake of Bilancino, to control the floods and hold a reserve for the city. So there is a lake in the Mugello again. And at Cafaggiolo stands the Medici villa, on the world heritage list since 2013.