Impruneta

Impruneta is made of its own soil: the cotto, that is the terracotta drawn from the local clay. From here came the tiles of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the building materials of the Medici villas and the clay the Della Robbia modelled — the bond between the village and Florence is physical before it is cultural. The name, on the other hand, does not mean what it seems: today's form suggests the plum tree, but the old attestations are clear and name another plant — Santa Maria in Pineta in 1040, in Poneta in 1299. It is the pine wood. After the year one thousand Impruneta headed one of the seventy-two leagues of the Florentine countryside, gave itself a statute in 1415 and was governed by a podestà and a council of eleven members; an autonomous comune, however, it became only in 1929.

The pieve of Santa Maria was consecrated in 1060, and the image of the Madonna kept there — attributed by tradition to Saint Luke — was carried down to Florence whenever the city was in trouble: famines, plagues, calamities. The portico in front of the church was built in 1634 by the Florentines as a vow for deliverance from the plague. In 1944 an Allied bomb damaged the building and opened the tomb of the priest who had been in charge in the fifteenth century: inside was a cushion of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, one of the oldest known pieces of European patchwork, now in the museum. The same war left a harder mark: under the German occupation several Jewish families sought refuge in the countryside around Florence, and at Impruneta at least eleven people were arrested and taken to deportation.