Barberino Tavarnelle

For at least three centuries, on the arms of Barberino and of Tavarnelle, a tiger stood out. It was almost certainly an allusive device built on a play on words: Barberino chimes with Barberia, a term then used by extension for the whole of Africa, and the tiger passed for the animal representative of that continent. Only, the origin of that figure was spurious, and did not match the heraldic history of the place, already confused in the seventeenth century, when some even spoke of a wolf. When the two comuni came together again, the new body promoted studies and research to set things right, and in 2021 it was established that the historic animal was a lion, black or azure; the azure was judged the better founded, because a shield so described appears in the Tabernacle of the Condemned painted by Benozzo Gozzoli at Certaldo. The blue lion, holding the Florentine lily, was presented to the inhabitants on the twenty-second of June 2022.

The merger, too, set something right: until 1892 there was a single comune here, called simply Barberino, and it was Tavarnelle that asked for and obtained its own autonomy. More than a century later, the two came back together. In the territory, at Passignano, there is a very ancient Vallombrosan abbey which from outside looks more like a fortress than a monastery: inside is buried the founder of the order, who died here, in the refectory there is a Last Supper by Davide and Domenico Ghirlandaio, and in its school Galileo Galilei also studied. Suppressed in the late nineteenth century, the abbey was turned into a private villa and then, according to the taste of the time, into a neo-Gothic castle; the monks came back to take possession of it in 1986.