Greve in Chianti

Greve was born as a market. The village was a mere dependency of the castle of Montefioralle, but it stood at the point where the roads met — those between the Valdarno and the val di Greve, and the road that came down from Florence through the Chianti hills towards the Siena country — and so it became the chief market place of the area. Its piazza has the shape of a long triangle, largely surrounded by porticoes, with the parish church occupying one of its corners and, in the middle, the statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano, born in one of the castles of this comune. The name, in its present form, is very recent instead: the comune was called simply Greve until the nineteen-seventies, when the territory entered the Chianti Classico subzone and «in Chianti» was added to it. A town that took its name from a wine.

During the Second World War Greve was one of the Tuscan comuni designated as a place of free internment for foreign Jews and political dissidents: at least seven people stayed here under forced domicile for short periods — two Slav family groups whose relatives were accused of anti-Italian activity and a Greek Jew, Vittorio Giuseppe Nacamulli. Under the German occupation, on the third of December 1943, during a round-up around the hamlet of San Michele, the Florentine businessman Goffredo Passigli was arrested together with his sons Leone and Giuseppe: deported, they died at Auschwitz. The town was liberated on the twenty-fourth of July 1944. Far older are its churches: the pieve of San Pietro a Sillano appears in the parchments of the Badia a Passignano as early as 884, and the font of the pieve of Cintoia, stolen in the nineteen-sixties, was later recovered.