San Miniato

Every November San Miniato becomes the capital of the white truffle: these hills are among the great hunting grounds in the world, and the fair draws gourmets and truffle hunters with jeweller's scales. For the rest of the year the town remains a viewpoint on the via Francigena, exactly halfway between Florence and Pisa, a position that for centuries was also a curse, because every time the two cities quarrelled the fighting happened up here. The first settlement was made by Lombards in the eighth century, and a document of 713 kept at Lucca tells the story: they settled on the hill and raised a church to the martyr Miniato.

The name, in turn, says which side it was on. Frederick II built the fortress here and installed his own vicar for Tuscany, and all through the Middle Ages the town was called San Miniato al Tedesco, San Miniato of the German; but once peace was made with Florence, on the last day of 1370, it changed its calendar from the Pisan to the Florentine and changed its name too, to San Miniato al Fiorentino. In the end only San Miniato was left. Here, in palazzo Buonaparte, the young Napoleon came to obtain his family's certificate of nobility, since the Buonaparte had distant roots in the town and without that paper the French military academy would not have taken him; and he came back as a general, to call on the last Tuscan Buonaparte. The emperor's fortress, brought down in the last war, has been rebuilt; and down in the valley the tanneries of Ponte a Egola are a reminder that craft here is a serious business.