Montale

Near here there was a Roman posting station on the via Clodia — the Itinerarium Antonini gives it as the Clodia, not the Cassia — and it was called Hellana. Not far off stands a castle named Smilea, and about that name the local source is unusually harsh. It derives Smilea from mausoleum, the word the Roman land surveyors used for a boundary stone, worn down into similea and then into smilea; and it says it is absurd to accept the derivation from sex milia ab urbe, six miles from the city, which a scholar named Ferrali had simply invented. First because milestones were counted with ordinals and not with cardinals, which is why there are places called Quarto, Sesto, Settimo, Decimo, Nonantola; second because Pistoia was not an urbs at all, but only an oppidum. Of the Roman road there survives a piece of the bridge over the old bed of the Bure, turned into a wayside tabernacle.

In the tenth century the torrent Bure was moved further south, into a new bed, and the road followed it: the via Clodia went off through Agliana and Chiazzano, and the monastery of San Salvatore in Agna and the pieve of Villiano were left on a secondary route. The pieve is the nucleus of the village: it appears in a document of 957, and the hill above it is called the colle di Montale on the twenty-second of March 1100, the first time that name is written. In the thirteenth century Pistoia built a castle on that very hill to stand up to the Guidi counts, who ruled from Montemurlo across the valley; it was finished in 1206 and took in the people of the surrounding country, and from then on Montale meant not just one place but the whole area, while Villiano survived only as the name of the church. In 1303 Florentine troops besieged the castle, took it and dismantled it: it was never rebuilt.