Massa e Cozzile

This comune has two names for three villages. Massa is a Latin word: a massa was a large farming estate, a holding made of fields and of buildings for production, and in the Middle Ages the word came to mean the fief or the castle those lands depended on — the same etymology as Massa Marittima and Massarosa. About Cozzile there is still argument: either it is a prediale, that is the name of a Roman owner, a Cotius, or it comes from the archaic coz, a rocky rise, a word that today survives above all in Sicilian place names. The third village was the Verruca, a castle Massa took from the men of Pistoia in 1303 and which its own inhabitants abandoned soon after, moving to Cozzile. The Verruca is still on the arms, though: the Greek cross is her, the lily is Cozzile, the mace is Massa. The shield remembers what the name left behind. And the arrangement was not a formality: to the authorities outside this was one single comune, but the three communities could press their own interests with equal weight.

Everything else here is a matter of being in between. In the early Middle Ages the territory belonged to the Da Buggiano lords, of arimannic origin, and worked as a buffer between the Lombard marsh and Byzantine Pistoia. Then Lucca, until Castruccio Castracani died in 1328; then Florence, where the comune obtained a nearly autonomous podesteria that lasted it until the reforms of Pietro Leopoldo. It was in the province of Lucca and in 1928 it passed to the new province of Pistoia. The oldest thing whose name is known is the parish church of Massa, named in a will of 976; the oldest thing on the ground is a farming estate of the fourth or third century before Christ, grown up where the veterans of the legions had settled, and two gates of it remain, Porta ai Campi and Porta a Buggiano, in the area they still call the Catrio. In the last century the people came down the hill: Massa and Cozzile are medieval villages of about a hundred inhabitants each, while nearly everybody lives on the plain, at Margine Coperta and Traversagna, which became towns within a few decades. Bernardo Pasquini, the composer, came from here.