Montelupo Fiorentino

Montelupo was one of the most important ceramic centres of the Renaissance, in Italy and in Europe. It began at the end of the thirteenth century with wares decorated in the Hispano-Moresque manner, and for more than three centuries the kilns multiplied inside the walls: by the end of the fifteenth century there were more than fifty of them. The scale of that work can be measured by a single measure taken: the podestà had to issue an edict forbidding the enormous quantities of waste and working residues to be thrown into the neighbouring Pesa, because there was a real risk that the river would be pushed off its course. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century the potters of Montelupo went to work at Faenza and at Cafaggiolo, carrying their technique with them.

On the bank of the Arno stands the Medici villa of the Ambrogiana, with a landing of its own and a river grotto: until 2017 it housed a judicial psychiatric hospital — in older language a criminal asylum — among whose inmates were the anarchists Giovanni Passannante and Pietro Acciarito, both of whom had attempted the life of king Umberto the First. The town, for that matter, was built by its enemies: at the beginning of the thirteenth century the Florentines destroyed the fortified post of Montelupo and on the same spot raised a walled castle, the true symbol of their rule over the valley. The name Malborghetto sometimes given to it is instead a romantic invention, not history. The walls were built in 1348, the year of the Black Death, and the podestà's statute dates from 1414. Where the Pesa runs into the Arno the water has come back more than once: in the floods of 1949 and 1966 the town went under as much as four metres.