The name of this comune exists only on paper. It comes from the union of two villages, Capraia Fiorentina and Limite sull'Arno, and in order not to have an endless denomination it was decided to keep only the principal name of each: Capraia e Limite. In everyday use, though, nobody says it — the two centres remain distinct in history and in urban form, and people go on calling them by their full names. The order too is a convention: Capraia comes first only for alphabetical reasons, while the seat of the comune is at Limite. It is the town hall that stands in the village which comes second in the name.
Limite, from the eighteenth century onwards, was one of the most important shipbuilding centres in Tuscany: here were large yards that supplied the nobility and the ports of half of Italy, and the master shipwrights of Limite made a name for themselves well beyond the region. Little of that world remains. The Picchiotti yard, which throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth was among the most renowned in Italy, was demolished to make room for new blocks of flats; the family's villa survives, today divided into apartments. The last boatyard left, Salani, builds boats for rowing clubs — which is the way this trade survived itself, by becoming a sport. It is no accident that in piazza Cesare Battisti, on the Arno, stands the historic seat of the Società Canottieri Limite, founded in 1861: it is the oldest rowing club in Italy. The rest of the village can be read in its squares: piazza Vittorio Veneto, which the people of Limite still call piazza Nova, dominated by the monumental façade of the former cinema, which had been the casa del fascio and today stands beside the Casa del Popolo; piazza San Lorenzo with its red brick church, for the patron saint celebrated on the tenth of August with pasta and duck; and piazza 8 marzo 1944, overlooked by a nineteen-seventies building that in the village they call the skyscraper and which houses the town hall.
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📅 Every year, on 26 December, for Capraia
Capraia celebrates Saint Stephen on 26 December, in the church dedicated to him. Every year, on the evening of 1 May, in Capraia Fiorentina, Saint Grania, protector of children, is celebrated by lighting the «fires of Saint Grania», which light up the whole town.
📅 Every year, on 10 August, for Limite, with pasta and duck dinners
Limite sull'Arno celebrates Saint Lawrence on 10 August, in Piazza San Lorenzo, with typical dinners of pasta and «nana», duck. Every year the palio of the districts is also run, pitting the residents against each other in four areas: La Punta, La Castellina, Il di Sopra and Il di Sotto.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
