Villafranca in Lunigiana

When Dante came to Lunigiana the fief was held by Franceschino Malaspina of Mulazzo, the same marquis whom the poet represented in the arbitration with the bishop-count of Luni, closed with the peace of Castelnuovo on 6 October 1306. To the Malaspina Dante then gave, in the eighth canto of the Purgatorio, praise without reserve, and to one of them — Corrado the Younger, whose court had by then moved from Mulazzo to Villafranca — he spoke using the deferential «voi»: he is one of only six characters in the whole Comedy to receive that treatment. Boccaccio too, who went about gathering memories for his Trattatello in praise of Dante, stopped on this family: he made Corrado and his daughter Spina the protagonists of one of the longest tales of the Decameron, the sixth of the second day.

The traces of that world are here. In the little church of San Nicolò di Malnido, in 1285, the sister of Moroello II of Giovagallo — «the vapour of Val di Magra» of the Inferno — married by proxy a son of count Ugolino della Gherardesca, and the document still exists. In the churchyard of the same church the crypt has recently been found where for centuries the remains of the Malaspina princes were kept: inside, nothing is left. Of the castle of Malnido, which watched over the via Francigena and was almost intact until the second world war, there remain the ruins left by the bombings. The marquisate stayed sovereign until 1797, with a stormy interval in 1705, when a revolt forced the marquis to ask the Medici troops for help. On the evening of 5 December, the eve of Saint Nicholas, the village still crosses the old centre by candlelight, and ends by lighting a great fire.