Vernio

The name comes from a Roman winter camp, castra hiberna, and the history of the place is that of a county which paid its taxes to Vienna. The fief passed from the Cadolingi to the Alberti counts of Prato, who withdrew here after 1107, and in the 13th century to the Bardi: the county stayed independent until 1798, when Napoleon abolished it, and its very prerogative was autonomy from Florence, because the taxes went straight to the Emperor. In 1512 the Spanish invasion left a famine behind it, and the Bardi counts handed out to the people chestnut flour, stockfish, salt cod and herring: from that distribution was born the Società della Miseria, which re-enacts it every year, once on Ash Wednesday and today on the first Sunday of Lent.

The mountains around the pass of Torricella were a piece of the Gothic Line. Between 14 and 24 September 1944 the Germans of Grenadier-Regiment 754 and the Americans of the 133rd Infantry Regiment, supported by partisans, fought over them under constant mortar fire; the Americans took and lost the positions again and again until they seized Hill 810, and from there came down towards Vernio and Montepiano. The regiment's commander, colonel William S. Schildroth, was killed by a mine. At Celle there is now a memorial park, with some of the German trenches still in place. On 7 June 1944 anti-aircraft fire had brought down an American B-25 above Poggiole: in 2013 the pilot's identification tag was found in the woods, and at the crash site the local museum raised a monument on the seventieth anniversary.