Scarperia e San Piero

On the upper part of Monte Calvi, in the fascist period, a fir wood was planted laid out in the shape of the Italian peninsula. Whoever wanted it was evidently counting on those who would look at it from above; but trees do not stay still, and today that outline has all but disappeared. It is a drawing made of living things, erased by the living things themselves. The rest of the ridge is covered with beech, chestnut and oak, and above run the passes that have always linked Tuscany with the plain of the Po: the pass of the Giogo, the most important in the valley, and the ancient pass of the Osteria Bruciata, the burned inn, whose name speaks for itself, where today runs the path from Florence to Bologna that they call the Way of the Gods.

At Scarperia they make knives. Family workshops have made them for centuries, and the town has a museum of cutting irons that keeps their history; above the village stands the Palazzo dei Vicari, which was the seat of Florentine power in the Mugello. The comune, though, is recent: it was born on the first of January 2014 from the merger of Scarperia and San Piero a Sieve, decided by a referendum in which both communities voted in favour, and its coat of arms holds together the symbols of the two towns. In the territory stands the Medici villa of Trebbio, which since 2013 has been on the World Heritage list, and there is the international Mugello circuit, where in 2020, with a calendar hastily rewritten, the first Tuscan Grand Prix in the history of Formula One was run.