Vaiano

Vaiano was a frazione of Prato until 1949, when it became a comune of its own. The place, though, is much older than the comune: in the middle of the town stands the badia di San Salvatore, a church of Lombard origin that belonged to a powerful monastery — Benedictine between the tenth and the eleventh century, then Vallombrosan, and suppressed in 1808. Above the town, at San Gaudenzio, there is a villa where Galileo Galilei liked to stay; his vineyard is still there, and once a year, during the June fair in the old borgo of Le Fornaci, you can go and see it, along with the oil mill and the old kiln.

In a house in the village, in 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi was given shelter while on the run after the fall of the Roman Republic. Every February Vaiano holds its carnival, and holds it in a way of its own: five allegorical floats built by volunteers, one for each class of the primary school, plus a float for the middle school; they go through the streets for two afternoons and an evening, and on the last evening, by tradition, the float of King Carnival is set on fire and the winning float proclaimed. The pieve of Santi Vito e Modesto, at Sofignano, has a facade striped horizontally in green and white marble. And Federico Fiumani, who leads the band Diaframma, wrote a song about the town.