Montieri

Montieri lies in the Colline Metallifere, the metal-bearing hills, and its name says everything: it comes from «Mons aeris», the mountain of copper. First recorded in 973, for centuries it was the largest supplier of silver in Europe, and everyone laid hands on those deposits: the bishops of Volterra, who had been given the territory together with its mines, and the merchants of Siena, who in 1181 bought a quarter of it and then, when the bishops fell into debt, took the mines themselves on lease. In 1214 bishop Pagano granted a company of Florentines the right to strike coin, and Montieri had a mint of its own.

Out of that tangle of powers the village built itself a commune by sworn pacts, and one of those pacts is a rarity: the breve of 1219, kept in the diocesan archive of Volterra, is the only document of its kind written in the vernacular, perhaps because it had to be read aloud to the people before being turned into Latin. The silver ran out long ago, but the mines worked almost until yesterday: the one at Campiano, below the hamlet of Boccheggiano, was still bringing up pyrite and lead in the nineteen-nineties.