Capalbio

On the arms of Capalbio, ever since the Middle Ages, there is an albino head, held up by the Sienese lion that was added in the fifteenth century. The name is said to come from Caput Album or Campus Albus, for the white alabaster of the area, but perhaps more simply from «Capo d'Alveo», the name given to the castle built above the river. That castle was part of the donation that Charlemagne made in 805 to the abbey of the Tre Fontane, a possession confirmed by pope Alexander III in 1161; then the lands went in emphyteusis to the Aldobrandeschi, were conquered by Orvieto and passed at last to Siena and to the Orsini, who completed the fortress. That was the good time, with walls, houses and churches. In April 1555 the Spanish troops allied with the Medici took Siena, and in June, after Porto Ercole and Orbetello, Capalbio fell too: assigned to Cosimo I de' Medici, the town entered a crisis that lasted centuries, made of marshes and malaria, of distance from the central power, of a state border, of roads that did not exist and of Turkish raids.

In the end it lost its comune as well: Leopold I annexed it to Manciano and in 1842 Leopold II to Orbetello, and so it stayed for a hundred years, while brigandage raged in the Maremma. Administrative autonomy came back only in 1960, after the Ente Maremma of 1951 and the land reform of 1952 had changed farming in these parts. Today Capalbio is a tourist town, with the lake of Burano on the coast and vineyards on the hills. And in its territory, at Garavicchio near Pescia Fiorentina, is one of the strangest and finest things in Tuscany: the Tarot Garden of Niki de Saint Phalle. There are twenty-two monumental figures of steel and cement, clad in glass, mirrors and coloured ceramics, one for each major arcanum; the artist worked on them for more than seventeen years, paying for everything out of her own pocket, and the garden opened to the public in 1998.