Vicopisano

Vicopisano existed because of water that is no longer there. At the foot of its hill two rivers then navigable came together: the Arno, which led to Pisa, to the sea and to Florence, and the Auser or Serezza, the branch of the Serchio that connected with the lake of Bientina and the plain of Lucca. That is why an open, undefended settlement — a vicus — became in the tenth century a castellum, and over the six centuries that followed one of the most important military strongholds of the Pisan area. The name records the change: the village appears as a vicus in a document of 934, in 975 there is a castle called Auserissala beside it, and around the year one thousand the two merged into the Vicus Auserissola that would later become Vico Pisano. How much that small castle was worth can be measured in 1165, when the men of Vico armed one of the eleven galleys of the Pisan expedition that beat the Genoese in Sardinia.

Then the water was taken away from it. The Arno was straightened in 1560 and the lake of Bientina drained from 1859: today the main village stands about a kilometre from the river, in the plain the bend left behind. What remains from before is stone: twelve medieval towers and above all the parish church of Santa Maria, which the Pisans built out of pieces of Rome. Inside there are Roman marble columns, outside Roman sarcophagi brought from the area of Ostia and Rome and reused as the tombs of the noble families of the place: Pisa held itself the heir of Roman civilisation and wanted its relics about it. The façade looks east, against the rule that wants it west, and there are two explanations: that they followed the orientation of the older church beneath, or that they did not want to turn their back on the village. On the top of the hill stands the Rocca Nuova, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and built in 1434: Florence had taken Vicopisano in 1406 and fortified it just as the rivers that made it necessary were about to be sent elsewhere.