Castel del Piano

The village appears for the first time in a document of the abbey of San Salvatore of 890, under the name Casale Plana; it becomes a castle of the Aldobrandeschi in 1175 and in 1198 it is called Plana Ferraria, probably for the iron colour of the rocks that stand above the plateau. In 1330 the Aldobrandeschi ceded half the village to Siena, and the following year the Republic took all of it with a siege commanded by Guidoriccio da Fogliano; in 1377 the men of Castel del Piano fought in the Sienese army and earned themselves a franchise on taxes. Under the arms, though, there is something else: the motto Facile primum, that is «without doubt the first», which comes from the Commentarii of Pius II — the pope had written that for the beauty and the ease of its position this is the first among the villages that stand on that side of the Amiata.

Under Siena and then under the Medici the village filled with palaces and painters, to the point of forming a school: the Nasini, a dynasty of baroque painters, are from here. Every 8 September the four contrade — Borgo, Monumento, Poggio and Storte — run their palio, which was raced for the first time in 1402. Between 1940 and 1943 Castel del Piano was one of the Tuscan comuni assigned to the free internment of Jewish refugees, and it took in eight; after 8 September 1943, with the German occupation, two of them, mother and daughter, Szerene Rosenfeld and Edita Singer, were arrested at Cinigiano where they had taken refuge, brought to the provincial camp of Roccatederighi and deported: they died in the extermination camps. The others survived in hiding in the area until the Liberation. In 1965 the tannic acid works closed, which had been the resource of the place, and almost in the same months the first ski lifts opened at the Macinaie and the Contessa.