Poggibonsi

The name comes from a hill and a man: the hill of Bonizzo, where in the middle of the twelfth century the villages of the plain joined to build Poggiobonizio. It was a proud Ghibelline city, which Frederick II proclaimed imperial and which the chronicler Villani counted among the finest in Italy, but it lasted little more than a century. In November 1270 the Florentine and Neapolitan armies took it together with the French, and the Florentines bought from the French the right to destroy it. The rich merchants fled by night; the poor stayed, and the victors forced them to come down off the hill and mix with the people of the old borough, down in the valley. Ever since, this place has carried the name of the castle it lost.

They tried again: in 1313 they began to rebuild the city up there, under the name Monte Imperiale, and stopped when the emperor Henry VII died at Buonconvento; to him, a few months earlier, they had handed the keys from a gate that is still called after them. In 1488 Lorenzo the Magnificent wanted on that same hill a thoroughly modern fortress, designed by the Sangallo brothers to withstand gunpowder: it was never finished, because with Siena subdued by Florence the hill was no longer of any use. Then came the last destruction, the bombing of the Second World War, which levelled almost everything. The town of today is rebuilt and hard-working: it is the second largest producer of camper vans in Tuscany, and its eastern hills fall inside the Chianti Classico area. Even the coat of arms tells of the prudence required: the lion was granted by the emperor to the Ghibellines, and the chief was added later in homage to the Guelphs of the king of Naples, who was his enemy.