Cerreto Guidi

There is one date that says something about the place all by itself. At the plebiscite of 1860, when Tuscany was asked whether to join the Kingdom of Sardinia, the yes votes here did not reach the majority of those entitled to vote, who were a little over one thousand seven hundred, and the abstention was — so the source records it — a record. It was not a no: it was a not going to vote, which in that year and in that Tuscany was an answer as well. The comune's coat of arms, on the other hand, carries something far older: a turkey oak, the tree of the woods that once surrounded the village and gave it its name. The device is documented by a seal of the fourteenth century and then by the grand-ducal armorials, but it was formally granted only in 1993. The woods are gone; the tree has stayed on the shield.

Of the passing of the Medici two villas remain, one here and one at Stabbia, and grand duke Cosimo the first had the pieve of San Leonardo, which is recorded from the tenth century, rebuilt from top to bottom, as part of a series of works he promoted in this territory. The sanctuary of Santa Liberata, instead, grew up in the fourteenth century around a fresco dedicated to that saint, and the cult went on growing in the centuries that followed: in the oratory of the Most Holy Trinity there is a panel of Counter-Reformation taste, attributed to Passignano, representing precisely the communion of Santa Liberata. In the territory there are also the oratory of San Rocco, that of San Jacopo and, not far from the built-up area of Fucecchio, another pieve dedicated to Saint Leonard, the one at Ripoli.