Pelago

The name of Pelago seems to say the open sea, and for centuries it was read that way: from the Latin pelagus, with the idea that there was once a body of water here, later dried up. A more recent hypothesis, which also takes account of the other Italian places with the same name — Vicopelago, Pievepelago — traces it instead to a pè-lakar, a Romance-Germanic formula the Lombards used to indicate a settlement placed at the foot of an encampment above: in this case the one at the locality still called Lago, on the heights of the Pratomagno. The sea, in short, was never a sea: it is the foot of a military camp. The village lies between the Arno and the Sieve, from eighty metres up to over a thousand, and it is a crossing of roads: the old centre grew up around the castle of the Guidi counts, documented from 1089, which belonged, however, to the Cattanei, probably their vassals. Here, in 1378, Lorenzo Ghiberti was born.

The stones tell of a long quarrel. In 1248 some Guelfs fleeing Florence, pressed by the Ghibellines of Frederick II, took refuge in the castle of the Cattani da Diacceto; then the diocese of Fiesole disputed the ownership of that castle with the Cattanei, and the controversy closed against the diocese only in 1445 — nearly two centuries of litigation. In the end it was the comune that took the castle: in 1922 it bought what was left of the Cattani da Diacceto building and, after a restoration that preserved the design, put the town hall inside it. The arms come from there too: they take up part of the Cattani blazon, and the two stars accompanying the castle stand for the two communities, Diacceto and Pelago. There were, besides, a good many castles here, such as the one at Nipozzano, of the eleventh century, part of the system that watched over the meeting of the Arno with the Sieve; and the parish church of San Lorenzo at Diacceto is recorded as early as 1073 under a curious title, San Jerusalem.