Pomarance

Pomarance stands on a hill at 370 metres and looks over the upper val di Cecina, but its most famous hamlet bears the name of a Frenchman: Larderello is so called after François Jacques de Larderel, an industrialist based at Livorno who around 1827 perfected the extraction of boric acid from the muds of the lagoni. The extraction had begun in 1818 by inefficient methods, and it ate up wood; when the demand for timber became unsustainable, Larderel changed the system and used the natural steam of the ground to evaporate the water. From boric acid the place went on to electricity: in the early years of the twentieth century prince Piero Ginori Conti began to use the energy of the soffioni to generate it, and between 1931 and 1937 deeper wells were drilled and the first cooling towers built. Today there are more than thirty power stations round about, for a capacity close to a gigawatt. And at San Dalmazio, from 1968 to 1992, stood the converter station of the direct-current link between Italy, Corsica and Sardinia: in its place there is now a solar park.

The name of the comune appears for the first time in 1128 as Ripomarrancia: the first part is the Latin ripa, bank; the second is uncertain, perhaps a Roman personal name, perhaps the old Italian pomarancia, that is the orange. Three painters took the name of this town as their own: they are all called «il Pomarancio». And the palio, here, is not run: it is acted. Every second Sunday of September the four rioni challenge one another with theatrical performances. It was born in 1958 as a side event of a football tournament, with a parade in period dress; it soon became a contest of theatre, stopped in the seventies and started again in 1986. The week before, the captains are invested, and to each of them the mayor says: «Captain of the Rione, in the loyalty of the game of the palio, go and bring your contrada to victory».