Gambassi Terme

From the thirteenth century glass was worked here, and from here the trade spread to Montaione and then to much of the Valdelsa; from Gambassi came Francesco Livi, who made stained-glass windows between the end of the fourteenth century and the first decades of the fifteenth. The village, meanwhile, was double: a Gambassi vetus lower down and a Gambassi novum raised on the hill, where the old centre stands today, and the inhabitants of the two came to terms through a series of pacts in 1150 and in 1170. Above them were the bishops of Volterra, whose lordship must have become unbearable, because in 1268 the men of Gambassi put themselves under San Gimignano: a dispute broke out between the two cities, closed only by an arbitration award in 1280. With the peace of Fucecchio of 1293 Gambassi passed to the Florentine contado, and with the Leopoldine reform of 1774 it was annexed to the community of Montaione.

From that annexation the village took back its independence in 1917, after twenty years of negotiations and the beginning of a revolt. The reasons were real: already in a memorandum to the electors of 1897 the mayor of Montaione listed that Gambassi lacked the telegraph, lighting, a square, a second parish doctor, and that the drains were badly made and the cemeteries deplorably kept. The same mayor, though, warned that separation would be economic suicide: the hamlet paid in taxes more than the comune spent on it, but the costs of the shared services — the clerks, the offices — were charged only to the main town, and that supposed surplus would turn into a deficit as soon as Gambassi had to pay for them itself. That is exactly what happened. In the arms there is a castle of three towers on running water: the water is the thermal spring, the one that gave the village the second half of its name.