In the Lunigiana the stone speaks from before everything else: in the territory of Fivizzano there are fourteen statue stelae, one of them seven hundred metres from the centre, and beside it a menhir and a cup-marked boulder that was a ceremonial place. Then came the Apuan Ligurians, and then Rome, and with Rome what this place still is: a stop before a pass. The archaeologist Ubaldo Formentini warned that the forum of Forum Verrucolae, from which the name comes, is not to be understood as a fair: fora were quasi-municipal institutions that the Romans founded along the great roads, with administrative duties over the upkeep of the roads and over public transport, and they systematically put a military garrison in them — which is why here a forum and a castle stayed one single organism for a long time, and why, when mercantile life returned in the twelfth century, the forum took its place again. In the Middle Ages the village still carried the name of the nearby castle, the Verrucola, on which it depended even for spiritual jurisdiction: the people of Fivizzano used the church of the Verrucola for civil rites and that of Pognana for funerals, and this until their own church was raised to a parish, in 1377.
The twentieth century arrived twice. The earthquake of 1920 devastated the village and the Augustinian monastery. Then, in August of 1944, the Nazi-fascist occupying troops carried out a series of massacres in the territory of the comune — Mommio, San Terenzo Monti, Vinca — in which more than four hundred civilians were killed: for this the comune holds the silver medal for military valour and the gold medal for civil merit. Of what is left standing three things are worth saying: the walls rebuilt by Cosimo I after Charles VIII had pulled them down, the baroque fountain given by Cosimo III in 1683, and the museum of printing in Palazzo Fantoni Bononi, dedicated to Jacopo da Fivizzano, who was printing with movable type around 1470, in the first decades of the art. Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti in 1777 explained the place by its air: the healthy climate «acts upon the good constitution of the nerves, and upon the liveliness of the mental functions», and therefore, he wrote, Fivizzano has always produced people of high intelligence.
