Four kilometres from the village, at Ortaglia, there was an Etruscan sanctuary with a great temple of the late archaic age. Of the temple nothing stands, because landslides have carried the ground away; what remains is the well, deep and imposing, tied to the rites of the sanctuary, and inside the well most of the temple's materials were found, thrown in there when the building was rebuilt at the end of the fourth century before Christ. Around two hundred before Christ the complex stops working, and it happens just as Volterra, on which this territory depended, was remaking on a grand scale the sacred area of its own acropolis. Then came the castle — named in 1061 as «in località Petiole» — and the wars: in 1163 Pisa put down a rebellion led by Giovanni Borgherucci and in retaliation pulled down the stronghold and the walls. With the peace of Fucecchio of 1293 the village was split in two: political and civil control to Pisa, spiritual jurisdiction to the bishop of Volterra.
Today Peccioli is known for something villages usually hide: the landfill. The plant stands near Legoli and is run by a company of which the comune owns seventy per cent, while the rest belongs to about nine hundred local inhabitants, who are therefore shareholders in the rubbish that passes by their houses. In 2022 the revenues reached fifty-two million euros and the dividends distributed were two million eight hundred thousand. Meanwhile, in a village of a little under five thousand people, there is an open-air amphitheatre inaugurated in July 2007 and built with eco-compatible materials, a library opened in 2019, an astronomical observatory and the museums of Palazzo Pretorio, with a collection of Russian icons; on 31 March 2024 Peccioli won the television contest of the borgo dei borghi, the village of villages.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Peccioli
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
