Monteroni d'Arbia

The name says the same thing twice: monte plus tirone, and tirone, from a late Latin word, already meant a height. In the Middle Ages that meaning was lost, the word was taken for a proper name and people felt the need to put the common noun in front of it; the other Monteroni, the one in the Salento, was born the same way. The second half of the name is the Arbia torrent, which gives the valley its name too. The Francigena and the Cassia passed through here, and at that time they probably coincided, and the road is the reason this place exists: in the thirteenth century, between Ponte a Tressa and Ponte d'Arbia, there were eight hospitals for travellers. At Ponte d'Arbia the archbishop Sigeric stopped on his way home from Rome to England, and he wrote the stop down in his diary.

From the early twelve hundreds the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala of Siena began buying land here, and in 1322 it built a mill that was enormous for its time, in front of the church of San Donato: it is around that mill that the village grew. In the fourteenth century nearly everything belonged to the hospital — the mill, the palace used as a grain store, two inns and several buildings — while the land around was still in the hands of the great Sienese families. The grange of Cuna, the fortified farm, administered the territory for the hospital and worked on it: it drained the ground near the Arbia, fortified, built bridges, regulated the waters. Then came the plague of 1348, the companies of fortune, and the war of Siena, in which the mill was burned. The comune as such was set up only in 1810, in the Napoleonic period. And the Arbia is the stream Dante remembers as «colorata in rosso», coloured red, after the battle of Montaperti.