Rufina

The coat of arms of Rufina has been rewritten three times, and every rewriting is a piece of Italian history. The first, granted by royal decree in 1927, had an eagle standing on a horizontal fascio littorio. When the regime fell, the first thing done was to remove the fascio. At the end of the nineteen fifties there was another intervention: in place of the eagle came three golden ears of wheat, and the silver six-pointed star became red and five-pointed. The arms in use today are of 1987, and for the first quarter an older and less compromising reference was sought, the symbol of the county of Turicchi, which the bishops of Fiesole held in fief and which later ended up inside the comune. Four states of the same shield: whoever looks at them in a row sees fascism, the Republic and the need to give oneself a longer history go by.

Rufina is, for that matter, a young village. The built-up area was born in 1760 from a group of houses that grew near the bridge over the Rufina torrent, along the road that carried the Mugello and Tuscan Romagna to Florence; the new bridge was built in the three years after 1783, the church of San Martino was consecrated on 30 June 1819 with the contribution of the Casini family, and the autonomous comune came only on 2 December 1915, by lieutenancy decree, after a referendum on separation from Pelago. Even before that, though, someone had worked the land: at the end of the seventeenth century the friars settled at Poggiolo built embankments, drained along the Sieve and widened the vineyards — and it is from there that comes the thing Rufina is known for, the Chianti subzone that bears its name, and Pomino. On 17 April 1944, at Berceto near Pomino, during a round-up German and fascist troops captured and immediately shot two partisans, Guglielmo Tesi and Mauro Chiti, and then killed nine civilians guilty of having sheltered them.