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| …Ecco il solo paese della provincia ove
il tuo animo si apre ad un conforto, perchÈ cosÏ vede
le forze della natura chiamate dall’arte a
contribuire all’industria di una intiera popolazione
… [Here is the only village in the whole province where your soul will find comfort in seeing nature transformed into art and thus contributing to the industry of an entire population …] |
 © Photo: Andrea Barghi |
| These enthusiastic words
from the Casentino calendar for the year 1840 confirm a
particularly lively economic and social climate for which
the availability of abundant natural resources,
especially water, was an indispensable premise. Stia lies at the confluence of two watercourses, the Staggia and the Arno, and is therefore in a privileged position, somehow exceptional and almost sacred, as suggested by the Romanesque pieve of Santa Maria Assunta located a short distance away and confirmed by finds made below the present ground-level attesting to even more ancient religious practices. The mythical-religious aspect was no doubt soon flanked by an economic, functional one: water was the indispensable element for satisfying man’s primary needs and his innumerable productive activities. For centuries the waters of the Staggia drove wheels and powered rudimentary gears of grinding mills, ironworks, paper mills and fulling mills. Thanks to the abundance of raw material, iron-working, but especially wool processing, gradually became so successful as to become, in more recent times, the main driving force of the community’s economy. As industrialisation asserted itself, the old mills scattered along the stream and the wool-workers’ shops were replaced by a wool factory, which concentrated the entire processing cycle in a single building. |
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 © Photo: Andrea Barghi |
For generations, the factory provided employment to both men and women and at times had over 500 workers. It knew moments of glory (official supplier to the Royal Family) and decline before being shut down for good in the late 1950s. |
| The town’s layout
still speaks of this not-yet-forgotten identity: first
and foremost the old market-place in Piazza Tanucci, site
of the old wool-processing shops and rightly called one
of Italy’s most beautiful squares. From the square, the town’s civil and religious heart, Vicolo dei Berignoli leads to the wool factory, the valley’s most interesting example of industrial architecture. A short distance away is the dye-works with the impressive canal bridge built by the grand-ducal inspector, Karl Siemon. From the textile mill, a modern foot-bridge takes us across the Staggia into a new reality where once again water plays a central role: the Fonti di Calcedonia spa. A modern laminated wooden entryway fronts the Palagio Fiorentino, a reconstruction of the ancient castle in neo-Gothic style dating from the turn of the century. Around the ‘manor’, where original pieces are juxtaposed with reconstructions and inventions with a mediaeval flavour, interesting sculptures and plants are still present that take us back to the atmosphere of the Romantic garden. Our hypothetical tour concludes in the town’s other major square, Piazza Mazzini, locally called ‘al gioco’ because a football pitch used to exist here. Most of the constructions jutting out onto the square, the theatre included, were specially built for the workers at the wool factory. Stia is thus a tiny example of a factory city, the reason some ironically refer to it as ‘the little Manchester of Casentino'. |
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In the area surrounding Stia, perched on steep hills that provide a lovely setting for Monte Falterona, we find two more attractions as a complement to the town at the bottom of the valley: the Castle of Porciano, which protected Stia’s development as a market-place, and the Sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a place of worship immersed in the countryside and a spiritual centre for all the villages in the area. Tradition holds that it was built following an appearance of the Madonna. |
 © Photo:Andrea Barghi |
