To the eye of the beholder Tuscany is a medieval open-air museum. Little or nothing is visible of its Etruscan past. There are scanty ruins on several sites boasting an Etruscan origin, but what we actually see when we get there is Roman relics among a wealth of medieval buildings. How “this” Tuscany came into being is not always clear, but the evidence is there. 

 

Casentino is the ancient name of the upper valley of the Arno, through which the river flows, after issuing from its source on Mt Falterona, as far as the city of Arezzo. The Arno rises at no great distance from its companion, the Tiber, and runs parallel to it for a while, as if both had been marked out to share a splendid destiny. 

 

The Casentino, called by many "The Valley Enclosed", is quintessential Italy. The culture which has moulded Tuscany as it is known in history has been preserved here in a language and in traditions long vanished elsewhere. The Casentino is indeed the Arcadia of Tuscany, and in the middle of it rise the hill-towns of Poppi and Bibbiena, which epitomise the typical Central Italian hill-towns. 

 

Over the centuries this highly cultured but seemingly wild, beautiful land has sheltered a succession of saints, mystics and poets attracted by the peaceful isolation offered by its high peaks and ancient forests. St. Francis of Assisi received the stigmata here, the exiled Dante took refuge with the Counts of Guidi in their castle at Romena and the natural beauty of the Vallombrosa pinewoods so inspired English poet John Milton that he immortalized it in his epic poem "Paradise Lost" of 1638. 

 

This is a rural land with more than its fare share of pasture, vineyards, chestnuts and clean waters. Castles, medieval towns and villages, watchtowers and monasteries are set in the landscape like precious stones in a crown.

The Casentino and the becoming of Medieval Tuscany

 

Numerous villages, which after the collapse of the Roman Empire arose on the sites of ruined Etruscan settlements, became castles. Rural villages and their fortifications were rebuilt of stone, becoming more permanent, and thus preserving their prehistoric and Etruscan place-name. Cases in point are many scattered through the Casentino area, in eastern Tuscany.

 

Of the events which led to the collapse of Roman civilisation and to its replacement by the 'Arian' civilisation, which will pervade Western medieval culture till the flourishing of the "Renaissance" in the 15th c., we know no more than that it is a matter of fact.

 

The Feudal system, chivalry, the castle, monasticism, and all that is new as opposed to what was in vogue during the Roman era, came westward from Central Asia, and especially from that broad nomadic region which had been Hellenised by Alexander the Great. These nomads brought along breeds of horses, of sheep, the water buffalo, and the longhorn ox. Diet begun to include more meat, milk products such as mozzarella, and, for the first time in Italy, pasta.

 

The entire Feudal social and economic system  that replaced the Roman, did not originate in France at all, but in Central Asia, where it had existed for centuries, as an overwhelming body of written and archaeological sources unquestionably prove. 

 

 Records of the 9th c., from the Chianti and from other districts, provide a clear panorama of the new territorial set up after the establishment of the Iranian social system. Intensely cultivated districts were interspersed with totally deserted ones, where forests had spread over the old "latifundi". Settlement favoured higher altitudes, restoring the ancient Etruscan territories, recovering not only place-names, but also field systems and forms of cultivation.

 

Courts, also called "villae", were of two types. On one hand there were villas devoted to agriculture and growing cereals, legumes, vines, where free men, tied men and serfs, worked together; on the other hand there were villas devoted to stock rearing, where people of different origins -Alans, Bulgars, Avars - worked under Goth or Langobard landlords.

 

The Age of Castles: From 10th to 12th c.

 

Houses or huts were built with perishable materials and belonged to Germanic types. The dwelling of the dispersed village, more common on lower hills, consists of a single room with a central post supporting the roof; the floor is either unpaved or paved with stone slabs, the fireplace is in the middle of the room and above it hangs a cauldron.

 

Dwellings had walls of mixed earth and some stone, rarely they were covered with tiles; the floor was bare earth. Sites on, hilltops are old "curtis" now turned to castles by acquiring a moat or rampart. Only the lords' residence, the tower, or the "palazzo" is made of fashioned stones. It is highly probable that the builders of such towers, churches and "palaces", were immigrants from the Near East.

 

The majority of castles in the Casentino begin to appear in the records from the 9th c., belonging to a family of Germanic origin from Ferrara, the Guidi, settled in Tuscany. This family gradually took over the upper Casentino. The Guidi family held sway over a territory stretching throughout Central Italy to the Apennine watershed. This family established its principal seat in the Casentino in the late 10th c. From here it held absolute power well into the 13th c.

 

Responding to the requirements of military activity, castles, designed as aristocratic residences, were converted into strongholds, and villages grew outside the walls. Since Etruscan times the Stone of La Verna had been a haven for thieves and highwaymen who thrived on the pillage of flocks and goods caravans coming and going from the Tiber Valley to the Valley of the Arno- The Franciscan sanctuary, the most venerable institution of the Casentino after Camaldoli, came into being thus.

 

 The ambitions and aims of the wealthy bourgeoisie of the free communes gave no quarter to the old landed aristocracy. The hostility of Florence manifested itself in all its determination when in 1440 the Casentino was invaded by the Florentine army with the help of the Guidi of Battifolle. The castle of Poppi, freshly converted into a residential fortress, was seized, and with other similar castles of the Casentino, became the seat of a Florentine Governor representative of the Florentine Republic.

 

Cities, resurrected from their ruins, were inhabited by a population of largely Middle Eastern origin, turned into a bourgeoisie or urban nobility, thanks to trade, banking and craftsmanship, overpowering the old rural nobility of Germanic origins, who either succumbed or joined in by moving their residence to the city itself. No compromise was found between a civilisation that, under the influence of its nomad origins believed in Customary Law and another which, influenced by Byzantium, followed the tradition of Roman Right.

 

In the late 13th c., scattered houses were common all over the countryside. These had a rectangular plan, with fashioned stone walls and a roof covered with terracotta tiles. These isolated houses, found mainly on gentle slopes and hilltops were in the main the dwellings of tenant farmers of the sharecropping system.

 

As the plague spread, halving the population, the "mezzadrìa" (sharecropping) system of farming also spread. This system, hitherto a rare occurrence, gradually became widespread, drawing from the ancient Etruscan and Roman traditions which never died out in outlying districts. People of Jewish, Syrian, Greek, Armenian,  Egyptian and Iranian ancestry made up the bulk of the urban population of Tuscany and elsewhere. At the beginning of the 14th c. a bourgeoisie class of merchants, bankers and craftsmen had established itself, bringing the wealth and the confidence necessary to create a new urban aristocracy, which during this century absorbed or eliminated the ancient rural or 'palatine' nobility of Germanic origin. The wool trade reached its peak during the 14th c.; English wool and oriental dyes produced a heavy red fabric which was sold throughout the known world.