Licciana Nardi

The village was born of a road. Along the valley of the Taverone ran the Strata Lizane, the road of Linari, which linked the lands beyond the Apennines with the middle val di Magra; according to Ubaldo Formentini it was only in the thirteenth century that this road, cleared of the small lordships that had thickened along its course and brought under the great Malaspina marquisates, was reopened to the traffic of the cities, perhaps on the initiative of the men of Lucca. From then on the borgo grows fast, and the first written record of the name is of 1255; before that Licciana was one of the villages of the vico of San Valeriano, and served as a guard post for the abbey of Linari. The Malaspina fortified the whole settlement between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century: of the walls there remains above all the tower facing the provincial road, and on the other bank of the stream the castle of Piano.

Of the toll levied by the marquises it is known that over the centuries it became particularly grasping, and in the second half of the eighteenth century the grand duke Peter Leopold noted that the troubles of the countryside came from the people of the fiefs, «very bad and discontented with their feudal lords», and he named two: the count of Richecourt and the marquis Malaspina of Licciana. To a Malaspina again, the marquis Giacomo, the source ascribes the destruction of the parish church, which was rebuilt on a Greek cross with the dome at the centre and finished in 1705. In 1933 the village added to its own name that of the brothers Anacarsi and Biagio Nardi, patriots born in the hamlet of Apella: to Anacarsi is dedicated the ossuary monument in the town hall square. From here, at the end of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Attilio Piastri also left for Australia, the great-great-grandfather of the racing driver Oscar Piastri.