Rosignano Marittimo

Rosignano was for a long time Pisa's last outpost before the Maremma, and for that reason the seat of a captaincy. The first documents of the fortified centre are of 1046; after the death of Matilda of Canossa the castle passed to the bishopric of Pisa, and in the twelfth century Pisa recognised its institutions as a rural comune. Then came the Florentines: in 1433, after Rosignano had rebelled, they dismantled it. But a few years later the fort was standing again, so much so that in 1484 it drove off the Genoese who had landed at Vada. Of that nucleus there remain stretches of the northern and western walls and a few bastioned towers.

The rest of the comune came later, and almost all at once: in the eighteen hundreds the draining of the plain, then the Livorno-Cecina railway, and at last the factory. Rosignano Solvay, the company town grown around the works founded in 1912, was at first called simply Paese Novo, New Village: it has its own theatre, its workers' village and the famous white beaches, dazzling dunes born of the plant's processing residues. On the other side of the comune is Castiglioncello, the pearl of the Etruscan coast, which was the gathering place of the Macchiaioli painters, guests of the critic Diego Martelli, and later a retreat for Italian cinema. In the museum inside the fortress are the finds from the necropolises of Castiglioncello and Vada, from the Roman villas of the coastal plain and from the underwater archaeology along the shore. Among pinewoods, rocky coves and the harbour of Cala de' Medici, the coast here changes its skin every kilometre.