Roccalbegna

The village lies in the upper valley of the Albegna, at the foot of two very steep crags, one higher than the other, and on each of them stands a fortress: on the taller the Rocca of the Aldobrandeschi, on the other the Sienese Cassero. The name is the sum of the two things, the rock and the river. In the hamlet of Santa Caterina, on the evening of the twenty-fourth of November, the Focarazza is lit: in the middle of the pyre a long turkey-oak pole is planted, the stollo, and when the flames die down the men of the districts throw themselves into the smoke to wrench it from one another. Then they cut it into as many pieces as there were of them, and each takes one home to burn in his hearth.

Between 1940 and 1943 Roccalbegna was one of the Tuscan comuni chosen by the Fascist authorities for free internment: eight Jewish people were sent here, two of them children. After the armistice and the arrival of the Germans they were all arrested, on the twelfth of December 1943, and deported; they died at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, all but Teresa Kapitz, who was taken to Bergen-Belsen and came out alive. Before all this the village had belonged to the Aldobrandeschi, then to Siena, then to the Medici, who sold it to the county of Santa Fiora.