Arno

The Casentino valley lies between the Apennines and the Pratomagno. Precipitation is very frequent. Filtered by the trees of the imposing forests and siliceous rocks, the water flows down in a thousand rivulets that become streams, then torrents, and finally the Arno.

The Casentino’s richness in water is proverbial. Master Adam, the counterfeiter, condemned by Dante to dropsy and eternal burning thirst, is obsessed by "li ruscelletti che da’ verdi colli del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno" (‘the brooklets that descend the green hills of Casentino to the Arno’).

The Arno is ‘born’ in Casentino, on the slopes of Monte Falterona, where it has its headwaters. Further downstream, the Arno is a stately river that flows placidly beneath the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and makes its way to Pisa and the sea, but it starts out as an agile, fast-running stream that cuts through Casentino before ‘turning its back on the Aretines’.

Running from north to south, the river divides the valley in two parts of nearly equal area but somewhat different in their landscapes and inhabitants, as can be seen in certain gastronomic habits.

The Arno has always had an important effect on the lives of the people of Casentino, who shunned it in the days when it was unhealthy and unsafe, then sought it out when it became useful to trade, to economic survival. Beginning in the 15th century, the river carried the fir trunks from the Casentino forests downstream to Florence, linked together in rafts called foderi.

Still later, towards the end of the 18th century, its waters turned the fulling mills and the machinery of the first wool mills in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which produced the famous panno Casentino.

So man and the river are linked by a relationship that has not always been easy. Like in November 1996, when it was not only Florence that was flooded. To know Casentino and to understand it, it is important to know its river. Good places to view the Arno are Poppi Castle, where the river crosses the plain towards Bibbiena, or along the walls of the ancient convent at Pratovecchio, located on its banks, or on the slopes of Monte Falterona, at Capo d’Arno.