Michelangelo handed it to art without ever quite painting it: the battle of Cascina of 1364, won by Florence over Pisa, was the subject of the lost cartoon Buonarroti prepared for Palazzo Vecchio in rivalry with Leonardo — copies and drawings pass down its celebrated nudes. The real Cascina, a walled town along the Arno, keeps its parallel-street plan and Romanesque parish church.
For a century and a half it has been a furniture town: workshops and factories made it a district known across Italy. Pisa is fifteen minutes away, the coast just beyond.
Near Cascina
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
