San Marcello Piteglio

San Marcello Piteglio was born on the first of January of 2017 from the fusion of San Marcello Pistoiese and Piteglio, on the Pistoia mountain, between three hundred and eighteen hundred metres of altitude. But what holds this territory together is not a boundary, it is a day: the third of August of 1530. In a small palace in via Roma, at San Marcello, Francesco Ferrucci held his last council of war that day; it ended at Gavinana, which is a hamlet of this comune, where he was captured and killed. Gavinana holds on to it: there is the equestrian monument, there has been since 1931 a Ferrucci museum in an eighteenth-century building on the main square, and the battle is re-enacted every year.

The same 1530 comes back, though, in a stranger way. In the novel Niccolò de' Lapi, which Massimo d'Azeglio published in 1841 and set in those years, Lisa, the daughter of Niccolò, takes refuge in the grotto of Macereti, on the road between San Marcello and Spignana, dies there and is buried by popular piety in the graveyard of San Marcello. Before the last war a plaque placed by the fascist regime above the entrance of the grotto recalled the fact: a monument to something that happened only inside a book. The rest of the comune is made of quieter stones — the Loggia of the main square, put up in 1784 by grand duke Pietro Leopoldo for wayfarers and merchants; the suspension footbridge of 1922 at Mammiano, two hundred and twenty-seven metres of walkway above the valley; the astronomical observatory of Pian de' Termini — and of small things, like the bilberry, which in the Val di Lima is called piuro.