San Vincenzo

On 17 August 1505, in front of the coastal tower that gives the village its name, one of the most important battles in sixteenth-century Tuscany was fought. The Florentines, commanded by Ercole Bentivoglio, defeated the army of men-at-arms and mercenaries led by Bartolomeo d'Alviano, backed by the Sienese and come to the aid of the rebel Pisans. Sixty-two years later Giorgio Vasari painted that day in the Salone dei Cinquecento of Palazzo Vecchio, within the cycle devoted to the deeds of the Medici: the defeat of the Pisans at San Vincenzo. It is worth bearing in mind while walking on this beach — what happened here is painted on the walls of the largest hall in Florence. The tower, for its part, is still in its place and belongs to the comune: it appears in the documents in 1285 as Torre di San Vincenzo, and had been built by the Pisans against Saracen raids; its own name it had taken from a church dedicated to the saint that stood nearby.

The modern village, though, was born much later, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it was born from an inn: Antonio Benvenuti built and ran on the Via Regia a post station with a change of horses and an inn attached, and around that stopping place the settlement formed. To the family are owed also the public fountain and the land for the cemetery, given by a deed of 1878. In the inn the grand duke Leopold II stayed more than once, and his son Ferdinando passed through with the court: after those visits the inn was declared Imperial and Royal, as a plaque on the front still records. As a comune San Vincenzo is very young: it separated from Campiglia Marittima only in 1949, and its first mayor was Osvaldo Mischi. There is finally a piece of architecture one would not expect: in the hamlet of San Carlo there is a large quarry, and the material used to come down by cableway, now dismantled, to a storage silo near the railway, designed in the second half of the nineteen twenties by an engineer then very young, Pier Luigi Nervi.