Arcidosso

Arcidosso appears for the first time in a document of the fourth of March 860, and the name probably comes from arx and dossum: the stronghold on the ridge. From the twelfth century it belonged to the Aldobrandeschi of the county of Santa Fiora, who fortified it, building the castle and the keep with the help of the people of Casal Roveta, Talassa and Montoto, medieval settlements that have since vanished. In 1331, after one of the longest sieges conducted by the Sienese army — four months, under the orders of Guidoriccio da Fogliano — the castle and the village entered the Republic of Siena. That siege is painted in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, in the fresco attributed to Simone Martini whose authorship art historians are still quarrelling over. Under the grand duchy Arcidosso became the administrative capital of the Amiata and came to count more than twelve thousand inhabitants: four times as many as Grosseto, which was the provincial capital.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the town lived through the story of David Lazzaretti, born here in 1834, a carter turned prophet. On Monte Labbro he founded the community of the New Zion, with statutes founded on solidarity, which was to be the first nucleus of a republic of God, and he had the Giurisdavidic tower built there, which still stands up on the summit. On the eighteenth of August 1878, as he came down in procession from the mountain towards Arcidosso with his followers, the carabinieri ordered him to stop; he did not stop, the public safety delegate De Luca ordered them to fire and a shot struck him across the forehead. In the shooting three people who were merely watching also died, and Lazzaretti died that same evening at Bagnore. Then there is another story, more recent. Between 1940 and 1943 Arcidosso was one of the Tuscan comuni designated to receive Jewish refugees in free internment: twenty-seven arrived, families with children among them, one of the largest groups in the region. After the eighth of September 1943, with the German occupation, almost all of them were arrested on the twelfth of December of that year, deported and killed at Auschwitz in May 1944. Six escaped capture and survived in hiding until the Liberation; three came back from the camps.