Massa Marittima

The name Massa appears for the first time in a document of 973, in a list of castles and courts that the margrave Lamberto sold to a cleric — and that Lamberto's widow, Ermengarda, bought back thirteen years later. In the eleventh century the bishop of Populonia came here, his own city having been sacked by pirates and destroyed by the fleet of the prefect of Constantinople. But what made Massa was silver. The Colline Metallifere gave copper and above all silver, and silver was not only a good in demand for the trade with the east: through coinage it was the way into international finance for the companies of merchant-bankers, most of them Sienese. Massa was a free comune for about a century, it grew, and it built the buildings you still see. And from the first of May 1317, for at least a year, it struck its own money: a grosso worth twenty denari and a small denaro, which were still in circulation two years later.

Siena bound Massa to itself with four leagues and in 1335 subjected it completely. Under Siena the countryside was squeezed, small holdings gathered into great estates, the peasants ended up in share-cropping and the farmed landscape got worse. Then came the plagues, the worst in 1348, and later malaria, because nobody kept the watercourses in order. How far it fell can be measured: at the extinction of the Medici, in 1737, Massa Marittima had five hundred and twenty-seven inhabitants. The city that had struck its own coin was a village of five hundred people. Under the Lorraine it came back up: the land was drained, and today it is again the main town of the Colline Metallifere.