Pieve a Nievole

They tell that after his exile from Florence, in 1302, Dante was hunted through this country too, and that one day, on a bridge over the Nievole, certain men asked him whether he had by any chance seen a man called Dante Alighieri. He answered: «he was there when I was there». The bridge is still in via dei Tanelli, buried under the modern road, and everybody calls it Dante's bridge; and near the motorway junction there is now a mural devoted to the poet.

The pieve that gives the town half its name stands on a Roman pagus, near the line of the old Cassia minor which led from Lucca to Florence, and may have held the first baptismal font in the whole Valdinievole. The document that names it, of 716 and published by Muratori, concerns a quarrel between the bishop of Lucca and the bishop of Pistoia over a matter of jurisdiction — and it is the first certain document in which the very notion of a diocese of Pistoia appears. The other half of the name is still argued over: most scholars derive Nievole from the river, from words that mean simply a watercourse; others derived it from nebula, the fog that rose off the marsh, and that reading is now largely rejected. Pieve a Nievole became a comune in 1905, after a long struggle to detach itself from Montecatini and, above all, after getting round a law that forbade the birth of comuni with fewer than four thousand inhabitants. The town hall, incidentally, is a Medici hunting lodge of the fifteenth century.