Firenzuola

This village did not grow by itself: Florence founded it, on the drawing board, after breaking the Ubaldini who held the upper valley of the Santerno. The decision is of 1306, the first stone of Castrum Florentiole of 1332, and the name was given by Giovanni Villani — Firenzuola, little Florence — who proposed as its emblem half a lily, which was the Commune, and half a cross, which was the people. The plan was drawn by the engineers of the Republic as was done for the new towns of the Valdarno: regular streets, walls, porticoes along all the main ways of the centre and a fortress with its tower, of 1371. The territory is the largest and the northernmost of the metropolitan city of Florence, and lies on the Romagna side of the Apennines: on 8 January 1985 the Firenzuola station recorded twenty-six degrees below zero, the lowest temperature ever documented in Tuscany.

Standing on that ridge cost dearly. The Gothic Line passed through here, and on 12 September 1944 the Allied bombardments destroyed the village: nearly the whole built-up area, ninety-eight per cent of it, came down. Five days later the line broke with the taking of Monte Altuzzo, beside the Giogo pass. At the Futa pass stands today the German military cemetery, which keeps more than thirty thousand soldiers of the Wehrmacht, and near Coniale the Allied one of the Santerno valley, with about three hundred dead. In those same months, between 1944 and 1945, some families of the village hid from the roundups the five members of the Jewish family Smulevich: in 2021 Yad Vashem recognised as Righteous among the Nations two couples from Firenzuola, Pietro Angeli and Dina Rossetti, Armando Matti and Clementina Angeli. The village was rebuilt, but the mountain meanwhile was emptying.