Ponte Buggianese

The village is named after a bridge that no longer exists, and nobody knows exactly where it stood. The old bridge crossed the Pescia and its streams, joined the houses to the church and was the knot of the place; it was demolished in the sixteen hundreds during the reclamation works of the marquis Francesco Feroni, which changed the course of the Pescia and the layout of the town, and with time its position was forgotten. It probably stood in what is now the old centre. Here it was all marsh, and people settled only after the water had been taken away: the first document that names the community is of the fifteen hundreds. The second half of the name, on the other hand, is a declaration: the coat of arms bears the motto Bujano e castro nomen originemque desumpsi, from the castle of Buggiano I took my name and my origin.

From the following century onwards Ponte Buggianese began to claim its own autonomy. Meanwhile the grand duke Pietro Leopoldo, who came to these parts in 1782, had the whole flat, marshy territory drained and laid down that every family living in the village had a right to a house. Autonomy came by royal decree on the sixth of May 1883, and the name kept the memory of Buggiano; the comune entered the province of Pistoia in 1928, a year after the province was created. Of the marsh a great piece remains, the Padule di Fucecchio, which is crossed on foot or by boat and where people go to watch birds. And in the church of San Michele Arcangelo there is a cycle of frescoes painted around the nineteen-eighties by Pietro Annigoni with some of his pupils.