Bientina

Bientina is a village that was ordered to exist. The name appears for the first time in 793, when the deacon Saximondo di Gumberto granted the bishop of Lucca a piece of land in the monastery of Sant'Andrea in the place of Bientina; on the origin there is argument between the Latin bis antes, two hedges, and the Etruscan family name Plitine, and scholars lean towards the Etruscan. But the village as it stands today comes out of an order: in 1178 the archbishop of Pisa, Ubaldo, in order to gather in one single place all the inhabitants of the territory between Monte Pisano and the south-western shore of the lake, and to have done with the recurring quarrels with Lucca, obliged the people of Bientina to go and live at a precise spot, east of the bridge over the Cilecchio ditch. On the twenty-fifth of February of 1179 the consuls and another hundred and twenty men of Bientina swore to obey and to move where they had been assigned. From there begin the castle and the towers that can still be seen. In 1505 the village withstood its last siege, that of the Pisans with Spanish infantry, and the Florentine senate, for its loyalty, gave it fiscal privileges and the title of Bientina Fiorentina.

The other thing that made Bientina is the lake that is not there. North of the village stretched the lake of Bientina, the largest in Tuscany, and draining it was the work of two grand dukes: the works begun by Pietro Leopoldo were carried through under Leopoldo II with Alessandro Manetti's Canale Emissario, which sends the waters under the bed of the Arno. The lake ceased to exist in 1859, and in the same year the village changed its face on paper too. The old arms, taken from the marble in the tympanum of San Domenico, had a rampant lion, the Florentine lily in chief and, in base, a tench: a lake fish. On the ninth of June of 1859 the town's representatives asked the royal government to change them, and the new arms, approved by the council on the fourteenth of January of 1861, put in the tench's place a golden ram on a red field with ears of wheat, to represent the agricultural progress that came from the draining of the marsh. Outside the arms, in the church, there is still Saint Valentine martyr, whose body arrived from the catacombs of San Callisto in 1699, and who is not to be confused with the patron of lovers.