Buggiano

The name comes from a Latin personal name, Abudius — said to be a Roman soldier to whom this land was given — with the ending that marks the ownership of a holding: Abudianus, then Buzano, then Buggiano. On the coat of arms, however, there is an ox, because of a false etymology that ties the name to the Latin word for ox; the ox without the lily is still in the stones of the old gate of San Martino, and the lily was added to it after 1330, when Buggiano passed for good from Lucca to Florence. There was even a second coat of arms, recorded in a register of the historical archive: a red bull rampant on blue, used for a short period with the idea of giving the community of the borgo more importance and more force. Today it is on the façade of the sanctuary.

The first reliable mention of the place is a document of 979, when the Lombards held the Valdinievole and the Lucchesia while the area of Pistoia was still in Byzantine hands. The castle stood on a hill from which one commanded the road joining Lucca to Florence, and that is why it mattered; a family of arimanni, the Da Buggiano, controlled a large slice of the valley. Under Florence the town enjoyed a wide autonomy — the Florentines regularly installed captains here — and after Pietro Leopoldo's reforms it became the seat of a podesteria that administered nearly the whole Valdinievole, except Pescia. In 1928 it passed to the new province of Pistoia. For the Annunciation, and since 1367, the fair in Selva is still held. And in the church of Buggiano Castello there is a marble baptismal font with intarsia, older than all the paintings in the town, and an Annunciation of 1442 by Bicci di Lorenzo.