Scansano

For a century and a half Scansano was a provincial capital for a few months a year. In the Maremma malaria made the plain unliveable in summer, and after 1780 the estatatura was regulated: in the hot season the public offices of the province of Grosseto came up here, into the hills, and Scansano became vice-capital. Before that the town had grown on its own: the first record of the medieval settlement is of 918, when a curtis Mustia appears, identified with today's hamlet of Murci; in the fourteenth century the castle was disputed between the Aldobrandeschi counts and the Tolomei of Siena; in 1418 it went to the Sforza together with the whole county of Santa Fiora, through the marriage of Bosio Sforza and Cecilia Aldobrandeschi; and in 1615 the counts of Santa Fiora sold it to Cosimo II de' Medici. Today the name of the town is above all on bottles: Morellino di Scansano is the wine of this land.

The most extraordinary thing, though, came out from underground. At Baccinello, the lowest hamlet of the comune, there was a lignite mine, the last active one in the Maremma. From 1954 the Swiss palaeontologist Johannes Hürzeler dug there in search of fossils; on the second of August 1958 the closure of the mine was announced, and in the days before it shut for good the miners pulled out the complete skeleton of an ape, which they called Sandrone. It is the only complete skeleton of Oreopithecus bambolii, an anthropoid that lived nine million years ago; in 1960 Hürzeler argued that it walked on two legs, because its pelvis was closer to that of hominids than to that of chimpanzees and gorillas. Sandrone is today in the museum of natural history of the university of Florence. In the town, in the church of San Giovanni Battista, there is a copy of the Madonna dell'Uccellino by Andrea della Robbia: the original, a glazed terracotta, was stolen in 1971. At Poggioferro, instead, a Madonna and Child by Giovanni di Paolo, of 1475, is kept.