Castelfranco di Sotto

The name of this town is a contractual condition. Around the year one thousand, between the Arno and the Usciana, there were four small villages, exposed to the continual raids of the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines and between Pisa, Lucca and Florence; the inhabitants decided to gather in a single fortified site, and Lucca helped them because it needed a stronghold on that border. To make sure the town was well peopled, it freed from fiscal burdens anyone who came to live there: hence Castelfranco, the free castle. The urban design is that of a Roman camp, two streets crossing at the centre and leading to four gates, with quarters of uniform size; and the gates still bear the names of the four vanished villages and of the saints of their churches, which depended on the pieve of Santa Maria a Monte. The walls had sixteen towers: in the sixties the last stretches were pulled down, but three gates out of four have remained.

On the last Sunday of May the four contrade — which are still those four villages — run the palio of the little boats with wheels. The boats are those of the renaioli, the men who scraped the bed of the Arno to take sand and gravel with flat-bottomed craft; to make them race in piazza Garibaldi wheels were fitted underneath, and since 1987 the rowers push them round the square. A boat race among the houses, born of a river trade. The town, for that matter, has always bargained: in the thirteenth century it submitted voluntarily and alternately to Pisa and to Lucca with written capitulations of rights and obligations, and in 1330, after the death of Castruccio Castracani, it sent two sindaci to negotiate with Florence terms that turned out to be advantageous. In 1860 it voted for the unity of Italy with eight hundred and ninety-one votes in favour and nineteen against.