Buti

The name is first attested in 1068 as Buiti and comes from the late Latin bucita, that is ox pasture; but the first written notice of the village is older, of 841, and concerns the building of two churches. By the eleventh century the hills around were already covered with fortifications: eight castles stood on the tops, those of Panicale, Castell'Arso, Farneta, Santo Stefano in Cintoia, Castel di Nocco, Castel Tonini, Castel San Giorgio and Sant'Agata. They were needed, for Buti was one of the villages caught in the middle of the wars between Lucca, Pisa and Florence, and it was destroyed and rebuilt more than once. Some of those castles are lost; two, Castel di Nocco and Castel Tonini, are still small inhabited villages.

The arms are of gold, with an eagle holding in its claws two sprigs: one of olive and one of chestnut. The eagle is said to recall the emperor Otto II, who would have given the symbol to the church and people of Buti; the two branches, on the other hand, are what the village lived on. The olive and the chestnut were the chief resources of the area, and to oil and chestnuts there was added, from the nineteenth century, the making of baskets, cages and corbelli, and in the twentieth the furniture industry. The Medici built their villa here in the sixteenth century, on the ruins of an eleventh-century fortress — under the raised wall the medieval fortification can still be seen — and in the second half of the eighteenth century, with a new owner, the building became a house of luxury called Villa Delizia, frescoed by Giarrè, who also worked at the Certosa di Calci; beside it there was a secret passage, a natural cave, no longer accessible today. At Panicale, on the road that climbs to monte Serra, the old oil mills and watermills of verrucano stone remain, with their wheels, their channels and their arches. And in 2021 the municipal election was fought between two candidates both named Buti: Arianna Buti won against Monia Buti.