Aulla

In 1522 Giovanni de' Medici, the condottiero known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, bought the fief of Aulla from the Malaspina: he meant to build himself a personal state in northern Tuscany, and he had the fortress of the Brunella built above the town. But part of the population opposed him, and that opposition pushed him to sell the fief back. The place, after all, is a forced crossing: it stands where the Aulella runs into the Magra and the valley narrows between the hills, on the road to the passes of the Cisa and the Cerreto, and into a very small space there pass today a motorway, two trunk roads and two railway lines. The fortress was bought at the beginning of the twentieth century by an English couple, the Waterfields, and is today a natural history museum of the Lunigiana.

The name is attested in 884, in a document that speaks of the land between the rivers Magra and Aula; and in 990 the archbishop of Canterbury, Sigeric, on his way home from Rome, listed it as Aguilla, the thirtieth stage of his journey. A recent reading derives it from an old Ligurian word meaning wood, with the feminine article stuck on the front and never taken off again. On the twenty-seventh of May of that same 884 Adalbert of Tuscany founded the abbey of San Caprasio, which later went in commendam to the Genoese Centurione: their emblem was a wild rose, which became first the symbol of the abbey, through the commendatory abbots of the family, and then that of the comune — the white rose is still on the town's arms. Under the abbey the excavations have given back, among much else, a capital carved with the face of the devil eating a lily. The town was bombed in the last war and holds the gold medal for civil valour; it was liberated on the twenty-fourth of April 1945 by the partisans of the Val di Vara battalion. And on the twenty-fifth of October 2011 the Magra flooded it: two people died, and the municipal library was destroyed with almost all its books.