Castagneto Carducci

The name means only a chestnut wood, but this village first had its name taken away and then given back with something added. The history of Castagneto is that of the Della Gherardesca counts, and their influence was such that the place name disappeared: Castagneto, together with the castles of Bolgheri and Donoratico, was absorbed into the community of Gherardesca — that is, the village ended up under the family's surname. That family had begun with a piece of legal cunning: in 754 the Lombard noble Wilfrid, who would become saint Walfredo, had a great many properties in the Maremma and, becoming a Benedictine monk, gave them all — Castagneto included — to the monastery he was founding at Monteverdi. According to the historian Lopes-Pegna, donations like this served the Lombard nobility to shelter themselves from the property claims of the Franks, the new lords of Italy, by tying their own interests to those of the Church. In 1161 Frederick Barbarossa made the Gherardesca ownership of Castagnetum official.

The village then spent centuries taking its things back, in court. Between 1566 and the following year count Francesco della Gherardesca claimed the feudal rights of hunting, fishing, grazing and firewood; the Florentine tribunal left the lords hunting and fishing, but recognised grazing and wood as the people's, and only after many years, by 1610, were the counts forced really to give up the jus pascendi and the right to firewood. The baronial privileges lasted until 1749. The name, on the other hand, came back with a second surname on it: in 1900 the village became Castagneto Marittimo and in 1907 Castagneto Carducci, in honour of Giosuè Carducci, who as a child had lived near here, over towards Bolgheri. The village whose name the counts had taken away chose one that belonged to a poet. Along the coast are the pinewoods planted after the reclamations of the eighteen hundreds to shelter the fields behind, the Bolgheri wildlife reserve, and the cellars that have made these hills known.