Campiglia Marittima

On the slopes of Monte Calvi there is a village that died of competition. Rocca San Silvestro was a fortified settlement, founded between the tenth and the eleventh century by the Della Gherardesca to control the copper and silver-bearing lead mines that had been worked since Etruscan times: it had a walled upper part, with the lord's residence and the church, a lower borgo with the mill and the furnaces, and the ironworking was done outside the walls. In the twelfth century it grew, the walls were rebuilt, the palace got a new tower and cisterns. Then, at the end of that century, mining began to decline — the mines of Sardinia were competing and new processing methods had been invented — and the village emptied, until it was abandoned altogether in the fourteenth century. Today it is an archaeological and mining park, together with the Etruscan smelting furnaces at the foot of the town.

The name appears for the first time in 1004, as Campillia, and comes from the Latin campus; the specification «Marittima», meaning of the Maremma, was added only in 1862. Campiglia remained Pisan until 1406, when Florence conquered Pisa and made it the southernmost point of its dominions in the Maremma, an outpost from which to keep an eye on Piombino. The Palazzo Pretorio, which an inscription dates to 1246, carries seventy-two heraldic emblems on its front, beginning precisely in 1406: they are the arms of the officials Florence sent. Being a frontier cost it dearly: in 1447 the army of Alfonso of Aragon was stopped nearby in a battle that left more than two thousand dead on the plain of Caldana, and on the seventeenth of August 1505 the battle of San Vincenzo put down one of the last stirrings of Pisan independence — an episode Vasari later painted in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Florence. In the sixteenth century plague and famine emptied the town, which fell to little more than three hundred inhabitants.