Poggio a Caiano

The comune is one of the smallest in Tuscany, a little over six square kilometres, and it is young: it was created in 1962 by detaching a piece of the territory of Carmignano. But on the hill that dominates the town stands the thing that explains all the rest. In 1473 Lorenzo de' Medici bought here a ruined fortified house called the Ambra, with its lands and a mill; then he had the villa begun to designs by Giuliano da Sangallo — a great quadrangular country house around a courtyard, with a central hall from which one enters the rooms, and the windows of the rooms open onto the fields: for the time, a new idea. When Lorenzo died, in 1492, the villa was still largely unfinished, and it was his second son Giovanni, who became pope Leo X, who had the work resumed: the hall carries the name of that first Medici pope. In 1587 Bianca Cappello and the grand duke Francesco I died in this villa within a day of one another, after short illnesses; whether Francesco's brother Ferdinando, who succeeded him, had them poisoned is a question nobody has ever closed.

In the main hall are the frescoes by Pontormo of Vertumnus and Pomona. In a corner of the formal garden there still stands the tennis court of Cosimo I. The villa was used by the grand dukes and then by the Savoy, was given to the Italian state, stayed long neglected and in 1984 became a national museum; since 2013 it has been on the UNESCO list together with the other Medici villas and gardens of Tuscany. The town below grew around the hill and along the right bank of the Ombrone Pistoiese, at the point where the last spurs of the Montalbano come down towards the plain of Florence, Prato and Pistoia: a place of passage, and that is why the name is what it is — Caiano comes from a Roman estate, the farm of a Caius.