The name does not come from the river: it comes from a family. The Kaikna, a powerful Etruscan clan from Volterra, became the Caecina of Rome and left their surname to the valley and to the water; the villa at San Vincenzino, built for a consul of the Caecina, can still be entered. Then the Maremma emptied, and for centuries there was almost nobody here: in 274 the emperor Aurelian rode through and was struck enough by its abandonment to sign decrees meant to restore it, and Dante used it as a boundary, between Cecina and Corneto, to say how wild the scrub was. Malaria did the rest, and it is said that even Alaric caught it while crossing these lands, and died of it within the year.
Today's town, by contrast, was built on purpose, and recently. The land reclamation of grand duke Leopold II drained the coastal marshes in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the pine woods you cross on the way to the sea were born from that; in 1847 the territory was divided into fifty-nine lots, assigned to settlers from inland with the obligation to build eighty-two houses on them and bring the fields under cultivation. The municipality proper came into being only in 1906, breaking away from Bibbona, and the province of Livorno took it twenty years later. In the last war Cecina suffered forty-four bombing raids and a battle; the old Medici palace of the Fitto, where everything had begun, came through almost unscathed and was then pulled down by the town council in the nineteen-sixties. Today the town lies on the Etruscan Coast, at the river mouth, with its seafront at the end of the avenue.
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📅 Every year, on 19 March
Cecina celebrates Saint Joseph on 19 March, in the Church of Saints Joseph and Leopold named after him alongside Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Cecina, but an easy day trip away.
