Carmignano

For centuries this stretch of the Montalbano was a border. The castles of Carmignano, Artimino and Bacchereto were the southern outposts of the Pistoia countryside: they controlled the roads that crossed the ridge and the ways down into the plain between Pistoia, Prato and Florence, and for that very reason they changed hands repeatedly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, disputed by Pistoia, by Florence and then by the wars of Castruccio Castracani. In the fourteenth century Florence settled the matter, and the border stopped being a border. In its place came the Medici: Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo bought up vast properties here, Lorenzo had Giuliano da Sangallo's villa built at Poggio a Caiano, Ferdinando the First raised La Ferdinanda above Artimino — and most of the woods of the Montalbano ended up inside the Barco reale, the grand-ducal hunting reserve, bounded and administered for the use of the court.

Once there was no more need to defend it, the town came down off the hill. The old fortified settlement pressed around the castle on the height of the Rocca lost its military function and the people moved gradually towards the lower and more accessible ground, stretching the borgo along the southern slope. In the church of San Michele e San Francesco a Visitation by Pontormo is kept. The name is one of those formed on the name of a landowner, a Carminius; the lion in the coat of arms, on the other hand, is traditionally traced to the arms of Musciatto Franzesi. Long before all this, Artimino was one of the chief Etruscan centres north of the Arno, and a diploma of Otto the Third of 998 already names it, together with Seano, among the pievi of the diocese of Pistoia.