Monterotondo Marittimo

Here the ground smokes. The Biancane park takes its name from the colour of the rocks: the hydrogen sulphide rising from below attacks the limestone and turns it into gypsum, and the landscape goes white. Among the bushes there are jets of steam, fumaroles and pools that boil, and the vapour comes out at more than two hundred degrees. On that vapour the village built an industry: the production of electricity from geothermal heat began here in 1916, a workers' village grew up beside the Lago Boracifero, and the power stations of this territory still supply much of the energy the province of Grosseto consumes. The old plant by the pools is now a museum.

The old village stands on the hill, and its history is the history of the masters who followed one another: first the abbey of Monteverdi, then the Alberti counts, then Massa Marittima in the twelve hundreds and Siena from 1359, and finally the grand duchy. Of Massa Marittima the lion remains: it stands on the municipal coat of arms, silver on a gold field, above a green three-peaked mountain, because Monterotondo stayed tied to that town until the twentieth century. Around it, in the woods, lie the ruins of a great many castles: the Alberti fortress, the Sienese keep, Cugnano, Rocchette Pannocchieschi, Castiglion Bernardi.