Lamporecchio

The name of this village, first cited on the nineteenth of January of 1057 as Lamporeclo, comes from the raspberry: so hold Silvio Pieri and Pellegrini, with the second nasal dissimilated into an r. From here, from the western slopes of the Montalbano, began the rise of the Rospigliosi, who later moved to Pistoia and to Rome and got as far as the papacy with Clement IX. And the Rospigliosi can be seen in the very shape of the countryside: for centuries, from the fifteen hundreds on, nearly the whole territory belonged to two great farms alone, that of Spicchio of the Rospigliosi princes, with sixty-three holdings, and that of Carraia of the Manni counts, with forty-seven, and the little that was left belonged to a few other landowning families. Those estates only began to crumble from the second half of the eighteen hundreds, between divided inheritances and sales. Here too, in 1497, was born Francesco Berni, poet, and here lived Idalberto Targioni, whom they called the peasant poet and who was mayor between 1914 and 1919.

But the real history of Lamporecchio is in people's hands. Until the early seventies sizeable groups of Lamporecchio people, many of them women, went down into the marsh of Fucecchio to cut sarello, the grass used to seat chairs and cover demijohns, and cannella for making reed screens: heavy work, unhealthy, and often not even well paid. There were straw hats made by hand, and the dried-flower workshops that in summer employed mostly women. And there was embroidery, which in the hill country of San Baronto and Porciano still holds on: there is a stitch called precisely the Lamporecchio stitch, and it seems to have been born inside the sewing school founded by Laura Merrick. The village, though, is known above all for something to eat, the brigidino, the thin aniseed wafer made here, along with the berlingozzo of Carnival.