Cascina

The villages between Pisa and Cascina were named by numbers: Quinto, Sesto, Settimo, Ottavo, Nono, and further on Tredici — they were the Roman miles from the city, and some of those names have been lost while others have not. Cascina itself keeps the plan of the castrum, cardines and decumani in a chequerboard, and the centuriation survives in the -ano endings of the villages around. The name may come from a torrent that no longer exists, or from cassina, a country house; the first time it appears in writing is in a parchment of 750.

In 1313 a Pisan soldier, to avenge a tower of Cascina pulled down by the Lucchesi, destroyed one of theirs in Lucca and had the reason carved on a church wall, signing it with his own name: the inscription is still there. On 29 July 1364 the battle of Cascina was fought here, won by the Florentines over the Pisans: Michelangelo was to depict it for Palazzo Vecchio, in competition with Leonardo, but the fresco was never painted and the cartoon is lost — drawings and copies survive, among them the one with the half-naked soldiers bathing in the Arno. The Cascina reale, a walled village with pentagonal corner towers, keeps its plan of parallel streets and its Romanesque parish church. After the First World War the fascist squads killed here and nearby the first victims in the province. For a century and a half it has been the town of furniture: Pisa is fifteen minutes away, the coast a little beyond.