Vicchio

Out of this piece of the Mugello came two painters who changed painting: Giotto, born at the hill of Vespignano, where the birthplace can still be visited, and Fra Angelico, born at Rupecanina. The statue of Giotto stands in the square that carries his name, and it was put up in 1901 by a committee whose president was Giosuè Carducci, a regular guest of the Giarrè Billi family in the hamlet of Pilarciano. Between 1559 and 1571 Benvenuto Cellini stayed at Vicchio on and off, and in the house that was the goldsmith's there is now a school of goldsmithing. And then there is Barbiana, a tiny hamlet where the Curia sent don Lorenzo Milani because he was a nuisance, and where he set about teaching the children of farmers, that is, boys who according to everybody should have been working instead of studying.

The twentieth century took the village apart twice. On the twenty-ninth of June of 1919 Vicchio was the epicentre of one of the strongest Italian earthquakes of the century: of fifteen hundred dwellings seven hundred were destroyed, and another five hundred were left uninhabitable. The dead were more than a hundred, few compared with the thousands left homeless, and the reason is the hour: the shock came around three in the afternoon, after some warning tremors, in a season and a place where nearly everyone was out working in the fields. The walls fell too, and three of the six towers. Two of those left, the largest, were brought down by the German army during its retreat: one alone remains, the Cerchiai tower, which can be seen from piazza della Vittoria. And between the tenth and the eleventh of July of 1944, in reprisal for the killing of one of their comrades, German militiamen murdered fifteen people at Padulivo.