The name does not come from lime, though everyone believes it does: the rock of the valley is siliceous and the limestone quarries lie outside the comune. In deeds of the 10th and 11th centuries the valley is the locus Calcis, from the Latin calceum, the foot or heel of the mountain. When in 1867 the people of Calci obtained from Vittorio Emanuele II their separation from Pisa and the right to become a comune, the council approved arms showing three human feet shod in buskins, copied from a relief on the pulpit of the pieve. The Florentine office that regulated civic arms was unhappy and proposed an olive tree, a wavy band and a crenellated castle, that is the oil, the Zambra torrent and the Fortezza Maggiore: the three boots stayed, with the motto Viret semperque virebit.
The valley has lived on water. The Zambre served the tanning of hides and turned mills and trip hammers; the arte bianca worked the oil of the olive groves, the arte della lana the cloth, and the woods, protected by very severe laws, gave timber to the shipyards of the Pisan Republic. From the 16th century the village stretched itself along the main torrent for nearly three kilometres, and at the end of the 19th century more than a hundred water-wheel mills were working along it. At its centre stands the Romanesque pieve of Santi Giovanni ed Ermolao, built in the time of bishop Daiberto between 1080 and 1111, the year the relics of the patron were laid there; higher up, the charterhouse, which also houses the natural history museum of the University of Pisa.
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📅 Every year, on the first Sunday of August
Calci celebrates Saint Ermolaus on the first Sunday of August, in the Pieve dei Santi Giovanni ed Ermolao. The town also hosts the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
