Asciano

The western and southern part of the territory of Asciano is a succession of biancane and badlands, the almost lunar landscape of the crete senesi, which in the Middle Ages already had a name: they called it the desert of Accona. In 2008, from outcrops of Pliocene clay a few kilometres from the village, something came out that has nothing to do with a desert: the fossil remains of a dolphin that lived here more than three million years ago, when those badlands were the floor of the Tyrrhenian sea. Scholars judged the find to be of great value, because it is a fossil species that nobody had ever studied before. It is the best way to look at these hills: what seems a desert is a dried-up sea bed.

Legend has it that the village was founded by Ascanio, son of Remus and brother of that Senio who founded Siena; archaeology tells another story, and above all it tells Etruscan. In the communal territory are the tumulus of Molinello, used from the seventh to the first century before Christ, and the necropolis of Poggio Pinci, of the fifth. Of the Romans, on the other hand, one monumental thing survives, and it is a floor: the polychrome mosaic found in 1899 in via del Canto, which must have belonged to a bath room or a reception room of a rich imperial villa. In 714 a pieve here was disputed between the bishops of Siena and Arezzo; then the town was a fief of the Cacciaconti-Scialenga, until in 1275 the Comune of Siena bought it, strengthened its walls and held it until the fall of the Republic in 1554. On the arms there is a pun: a lion's paw holding an axe, an ascia. On 19 April 1862, just outside the built-up area, a serious railway accident cost the lives of twenty-two soldiers and injured sixty people. Ten kilometres to the south stands the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, mother house of the Olivetans since 1320, with the cloister frescoed by Luca Signorelli and finished in 1505 by Sodoma.