Valdichiana Aretina · Thirty centuries of landscape
The story
of the Valdichiana
A territory that changes without ceasing to recognize itself. Water, towns, fields, stone, people and traditions: a story that continues to rewrite the landscape.
From a logo to a landscape
Valdichiana is a picture
constantly being updated
A Leopoldina and some cypress trees: these are the stylized images that graphically indicate the tourist area of the Aretine Valdichiana. Powerful signs that symbolize a landscape that appears crystallized around certain icons, but is in fact in perpetual metamorphosis. The Valdichiana, we could say, is a painting in perpetual update; the painter, that is, man, continuously adds new colors from the palette, not with a brush, but simply by living within it and leaving the traces of his own past.
Like all of Tuscany's landscape, it represents the remarkable fusion of natural elements and human work over the centuries, so much so that the old and the new have become "contemporary", the result of a single creative act.
From the top of the walls, towers or bell towers, the visitor will see one of the most vast and harmonious panoramas in Italy: the fertile, immense Valdichiana plain, already praised by classical authors and celebrated in the words of astonishment of Grand Tour travelers, closed on the horizon by the mountains of Siena, among which Mount Amiata and Cetona stand out, and by the great mirror of Lake Trasimeno.
Water, land and human presence.
It is from this balance that the landscape is born.An ancient name, an Etruscan name
Before the valley,
there was the Clanis.
Literary sources indicate that in the Etruscan era the Valdichiana was one of the great granaries that supplied Rome, on several occasions, with cereals during times of famine. The grain was generally transported on large rafts along the Clanis, then the Paglia and finally the Tiber down to Rome.
The river, which gives the valley its current name, provided a water resource also useful for irrigation, fish (weights and clay rings for fixed nets were found at Melmone, near Castiglion Fiorentino), marsh reeds and much more, to the point that it was considered a deity, as attested by the inscription Mi Klanin present on the thigh of a bronze athlete statuette found in the locality of Quarrata in the 19th century, now kept at the Cabinet de Médailles in Paris, or the river sanctuary of Brolio from which extraordinary bronze statuettes come, which can be seen in copy at the Museo del Cassero in Castiglion Fiorentino.
Between the lake mirror of Trasimeno, on whose shores the memorable battle of 217 BC between Hannibal and Flaminius took place, the Clanis line and the pre-Apennine promontories gave rise, in Etruscan times, from the archaic age onward, to princely powers indicated by large tumuli and important urban centers at Cortona, Castiglion Fiorentino, Foiano, Lucignano, Marciano, Monte S. Savino.
We should picture the territory as farmed mainly for cereals, vegetables, vineyards and orchards, and, in the hilly areas, olive groves and livestock consisting of sheep and goats, pigs and cattle, with related resources made up of meadows and woods. This is attested, for example, by the many wine-drinking vessels, both of Etruscan manufacture (bucchero) and of Greek craftsmanship, preserved in the museums of the Valdichiana (MAEC and Cassero), or by the well-known Tabula Cortonensis, the long Etruscan inscription that mentions the presence of a vineyard at Cortona.
Hunting and fishing, both river and lake, were supplementary rather than substitute activities in the diet, as wild boar, deer, roe deer, waterfowl and songbirds were abundant, while competitors, mainly wolves and foxes, were kept at a distance, as attested by the many Etruscan bronzes preserved, for example, in the MAEC in Cortona.
"Mamma di Troia"
e nonna di Roma”.
It is myth that establishes the centrality of Cortona in the ancient Mediterranean, with respect to the categories of space (the place from which one departs for distant lands or arrives after a long wandering) and time (antiquity). Already known to Herodotus, the father of history, it was colonized in remote times, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus relates, by the Pelasgians, “the storks,” often identified with the Etruscans. Having arrived at Spina with their king Nanas and having occupied the fortress of Cortona, a city of the Umbrians, after driving out the previous inhabitants, they would swarm into the other seats of Etruria to found new cities.
In the 4th century BC, Lycophron and a series of later commentators and scholiasts recount that Ulysses, known in Etruria as Nanos (the wanderer), is said to have come to die in Cortona, near Mount Perghe, traditionally identified with the locality of Pergo, which received his burial. The story becomes more intricate when accepting what Virgil narrates in the Aeneid: from Cortona the mythical Dardanus set out to found the city of Troy, justifying the modern definition of the Tuscan town as “mother of Troy and grandmother of Rome.”
Arrival in Rome
The valley becomes
infrastructure
There is a coin series, known as wheel series or Valdichiana, of Etruscan-Roman age, whose images may refer to the supply of food commodities that were the subject of production: next to the wheel (which may probably refer to land transport on carts) appears the anchor (the Clanis river route?) while the krater, olive oil amphora and double axe may refer to wine, oil, timber.
The gradual Romanization first saw the introduction of centuriation and the establishment of numerous highly specialized rural farms focused on production, especially following the bloody episodes of the civil wars between Marius and Sulla first, then Octavian and Antony, which ultimately led to the distribution of Etruscan lands to former Roman soldiers; in a second phase, large agricultural villas with immense landholdings gradually arose in the interior. Several rural villas are known, such as those at Ossaia or Cisternella, near Foiano della Chiana.
Between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, however, the construction of a Roman road system begins.
The section built first, from Chiusi to Fiesole, is better known as the Cassia etrusca or vetus, since it recovered the Etruscan route connecting the cities of Chiusi, Cortona, Arezzo and Fiesole. The hydrological regulation of the Val di Chiana, fertile in the Etruscan and Roman periods but always subject to recurring water stagnation, made it possible, still in the Republican age, to run a road from south to north from Chiusi towards Fiesole which, flanking the western bank of the Clanis, thus avoided the detour through Cortona, known as the Cassia repubblicana.
To shorten the distance between Chiusi and Florence, a variant that even bypassed Arezzo, known as the Cassia Adrianea, was opened by Emperor Hadrian around 123 AD. The fall of the Roman Empire saw, on the one hand, the arrival of new populations of Germanic stock, such as the Goths, Lombards and Franks, and, on the other, the gradual spread of the new Christian religion, which the newcomers also embraced, with the birth of the first communities, baptismal fonts, churches, and saints dear to the newcomers (St. Agatha of the Goths, St. Michael the Archangel of the Lombards, St. Martin of the Franks).
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
The valley rises
on the heights
With the early Middle Ages, such settlement systems based on slave labor collapsed and there was a return to small hilltop settlements that soon became castles before the year 1000: examples of these are the admirable castles of Montecchio Vesponi e Gargonza. The first great abbeys also arose, such as Farneta, S. Michele Arcangelo.
The woods reclaim the landscape and the Clanis inexorably becomes a large marsh, which will continue to spread until the time of Leonardo da Vinci, who depicted it in the famous map of the Valdichiana, now kept in London. The great Roman roads are abandoned.
Gradually, with the Middle Ages, the first machines for processing cereals came into operation: this is the case, for example, of the first water mills in the Val d'Esse and in Montagna, as well as some windmills in the Pergo area.
Meanwhile, towns and settlements such as Cortona, Foiano, Lucignano, initially almost depopulated, come back to life and become free municipalities, later Signorie (as recalled, for example, by the Archidado Joust of Cortona, held in front of Palazzo Casali, which takes its name from the lordship of the same name). Civic and religious buildings, walls rise either in pietra serena (as in Cortona, Castiglion Fiorentino, Monte S. Savino) or in brick (Lucignano, Foiano della Chiana). This was a period, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, that saw the presence of first-rate historical figures, such as S. Francesco, S. Margherita and Frate Elia from Cortona, eminent painters, such as Beato Angelico, Luca Signorelli, Bartolomeo della Gatta, il Pomarancio, stained glass artists, such as i Della Robbia. Dominican and Franciscan orders flourish.
From the Medici to the Lorraine
The great transformation
della valle
With the battle of Scannagallo (also known as the Battle of Marciano) fought on 2 August 1554 In the Val di Chiana, between Pozzo della Chiana and Marciano della Chiana (Arezzo), the Spanish-Medici army of Cosimo I de' Medici clashed with the Franco-Sienese forces of Piero Strozzi: the battle marked the end of the Republic of Siena and the rise of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The battle is commemorated in the reenactment traditionally held in Pozzo della Chiana and in the exhibition inside the Tower of Marciano. Florence's presence is clearly visible in the many coats of arms of the Florentine captains that adorn the palaces of the territory or the fortresses, such as the Girifalco of Cortona, which dominate the towns.
The landscape
that we recognize today
If the Medici continue the incessant work of reclaiming the waterlogged lands, the new, great modification of the territory occurs with the Habsburg-Lorraine, which end the processes already started by the previous dynasty, regulating and reversing the waters of the river until it becomes the Canale Maestro della Chiana, creating the current landscape layout, with dry-stone walls and hillside terraces with olive groves and cereal fields bordered by maples married to vines in the plain (the classic Mediterranean garden); not only that: new crops from the Americas are also introduced, including the Mais e del Girasole (today the symbol of our valley) or the breeding of silkworms, whose mulberry leaves (still present by the hundreds in our landscape) provide their food, enhancing (in continuity with the ancient tradition) the scientific selection of the Chianina breed and developing the leopoldina as a new housing unit for agricultural production, a sort of counterpart to the ancient Roman villa, although naturally no longer inhabited by domains but from settlers. The first Academies are also born, such as the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, supported by the last physicians and the Lorraine, who make the library and the museum available for public use.
The end of a world
The countryside changes.
Memory remains
The Napoleonic interlude and the unification of Italy did not bring social upheavals comparable to those of the First and Second World Wars. The abandonment of the countryside and of the sharecropping system at the end of the 1950s led to a stagnation of rural areas and the loss of the values of what we today remember as peasant civilization.
We like to close with the words of Gabriele d’Annunzio who, in a way, with the image of plowing the lands of Cortona, creates an ultra-century-old bridge between the farmers of his time and the Etruscan and Roman ones, a bridge that in material and anthropological traditions, as shown by the photographs of Furio Del Furia preserved in Foiano or of Duilio Peruzzi in Cortona, had not yet been entirely interrupted by the mid-twentieth century:
Breaking the ancient Etruscan soil with the plowshare, the farmhand at Sepoltaglia, at l'Ossaia, uncovers the sword and the medal where the ear of grain will sway.
Gabriele d'Annunzio
These are the worlds still talked about by ecomuseums such as the Carro Agricolo di Fratticiola in Cortona, or by extraordinary folkloric events such as the Carnival of Foiano della Chiana, the Maggiolata of Lucignano, or performances by folkloric associations such as the cilindro.
The valley is not
a museum
Meanwhile, agriculture and livestock farming continue to thrive, and since the 1980s large Syrah vineyards have emerged, producing excellent wines made in futuristic wineries; olive oil today also stands out for its quality and, together with products such as the Valdichiana aglione garlic or the Chianina steak, enjoys a national reputation. Once restored, the many farmhouses across the plain, the hills and the mountains have also become enchanting agritourism accommodations, ready to welcome the many tourists who return in the footsteps of those of a few centuries earlier.
Walking along the routes of Francis, the Via Lauretana, and the Bonifica, attending a religious procession, or simply watching a sunset while lying in a hammock at the many farm holiday resorts of the Valdichiana is an experience, before being a tourist one, of historical significance.
Thirty centuries of history are ready to vanish among the mountains and rise again every morning:
a magical privilege worth experiencing.Curtun · Cortona
A city where
time remains visible
The city of Curtun (this is how the name sounds in Etruscan) still appears today with an appearance not too different from what it might have had over two thousand years ago, if only the churches could be replaced by temples and the Renaissance palaces by the more modest homes of the ancestors. Built on a buttress of Monte S. Egidio, it is enclosed by nearly three kilometers of mighty walls, of rectangular perimeter, smoothed by centuries and wind, remembered as "cyclopean" or "Pelasgian" in the notebooks of many travelers, with notable courses of Etruscan-age blocks and later medieval insertions; within these eternal barriers the ancient gates open onto the roads that wind up from the plain, following the varied slope of the mountain.
Along the entire stretch that leads from the plain to the city, there are terraced fields planted with olive trees and marked by dry-stone walls, among which nestle sumptuous villas enclosed by holm oaks, pines and cypresses, farmhouses, monasteries, monumental churches that seem to have been built for no apparent need, so isolated as they are and so perfect in the grandiose purity of the Renaissance line, with domes, windows, bell chambers, all in the spotless local stone.
Below, on the hill cone and further on toward the countryside beneath, are the most famous tombs, from the one called Tanella di Pitagora, already known to Vasari, to the Melone di Camucia (as the tumuli are called in local dialect for their hemispherical shape), and those of Sodo.
Walls.
Palaces.
Churches.
Cortona's appearance is distinctive: steep streets paved with flagstones, in an architectural complex dominated by pietra serena stone. On the summit of the hill towers the ancient Medici fortress, probably the site of the Etruscan arx. Among the medieval and Renaissance palaces, built over the ancient urban layout, the Palazzo Civico of the 12th century, the 16th-century tower, and the Palazzo Pretorio, with its Renaissance facade, better known as Palazzo Casali (named after the family that ruled the lordship of Cortona from 1300), which houses the Museum of the Etruscan Academy and the City of Cortona and a very precious library, famous among scholars worldwide, rich in 22,000 printed volumes, 1,172 parchments, 133 precious incunabula and 633 manuscripts.
The historic centre holds many "gems" for the visitor: the 15th-century Palazzo Fierli-Petrella, the 18th-century Palazzo Ferretti, the Renaissance Palazzo Mancini-Sernini (known as Cristofanello). Notable among the sacred buildings are the Duomo, first built in the 11th century and remodelled during the 16th century (the bell tower dates from 1556 and its design is attributed to Francesco Laparelli, the Cortonese architect who founded La Valletta); the church of S. Agostino from the late 13th century; the church of S. Domenico from the 15th century; the church of San Francesco, begun by friar Elia in 1245 with Romanesque-Gothic elements; the church of San Niccolò from the 15th century, with a precious painted "gonfalone" by Luca Signorelli; the Chiesa del Gesù, home to the Diocesan Museum with numerous very important paintings, including the most famous "Annunciation" by Beato Angelico; the Basilica Sanctuary of S. Margherita, founded by the Saint herself in the 13th century but completely rebuilt in the 19th century, with the Saint's Gothic tomb dating from 1362.
Outside, the church of S. Maria delle Grazie al Calcinaio, by Francesco Giorgio Martini, begun in 1485; the Renaissance church of S. Maria Nuova; Villa Passerini (known as the Palazzone), built by G.B. Caporali around 1515 and currently the summer seat of the Scuola Normale Superiore; set in a naturalistic landscape of exceptional value is the Capuchin Convent at the "Celle," which arose near the cell where St. Francis of Assisi lived; sublime examples of Romanesque art are the Abbey of Farneta, pre-Romanesque, and that of S. Angelo a Metelliano (estate of that Etruscan gens whose best-known member, Aule Metelis, was depicted in the famous statue of the Arringatore).
Cortona was the birthplace of the painters Luca Signorelli and Pietro da Cortona, and the Futurist painter Gino Severini was also born here; works by both are preserved in local museums and churches, while Gino Severini's well-known Via Crucis, with aedicules containing mosaic scenes, marks a steep path connecting Piazza Garibaldi with the Sanctuary of Santa Margherita.
Numerous great figures, visitors and travelers were attracted by the beauty of the city of Cortona from the Middle Ages onward and bore witness to it in their writings. But Cortona's fame resonates above all among English-speaking travelers and writers, among whom G. Dennis, who left a fundamental publication on his travels in Etruscan territory, the writers D.H. Lawrence and H. James, and on the pages of many travel diaries written between 1860 and 1924. More recently, the extraordinary success of the volume Under the Tuscan sun, the work of American writer Frances Mayes, has helped spread around the world the beauty of the Cortona landscape, its evocative power, and the pleasure of life amid the colors, scents and flavors of the Tuscan land.
The past is not behind us.
It is in the landscape.
Every road, field, wall, village and tradition adds a new layer to a story that has never stopped transforming.
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