Castel focognano

Castel Focognano appears for the first time in written records in 989, in a contract of sale that mentions the border as the “public street of Monte Focognano”, a place name that thus does not imply the existence of a castle or even a village. We have to wait until 1022 to find the first explicit mention in written sources of the castrum: a diploma from Emperor Arrigo II confirms the "Castle Foconianum" as the Aretine monastery of SS. Flora and Lucilla. A subsequent imperial diploma from Frederick I then testifies that in 1177 the castle was still listed among the possessions of the said monastery. Written sources have then plenty of opportunities to deal with Castel Focognano in the first decades of the fourteenth century: in 1322, the Bishop of Arezzo Guido Tarlati, after six months under siege, took the castle «by surprise, through an underground passage, knocking down the walls and all sorts of fortification", as claimed by the Repetti, or “by treason”, as claimed by Villani: «the Fiorentini, during the siege, having being asked for help, sent a hundred horsemen; but while they were making war preparations [ ...], the bishop, for treason hatched by Pievano to serve the besieged lords, gave up the castle […], and […] had everything burnt and torn down to the ground». The terrible destruction suffered by the castle on this occasion would even be the origin of the name of the centre, according to the report by the mayor of Castel Focognano, requested by the Napoleonic administration in 1809, also admitting that the castle was thus named even earlier: «It is thought to have been named Castel Focognano after a fire, a name which it had even before the fire of 1320, having probably suffered from another fire earlier on». The origin of the name of the place is in reality more than likely due to the Roman praedial toponymy, one that originates from the Latin name of a person, made into an the adjective by the "-ano" suffix, indicating the ownership of agricultural land: according to Soderi, the personal name in question would be Voconius, according to Pieri, Falconius.

On the tomb of Guido Tarlati in the cathedral of Arezzo, the tomb which celebrates the bishop by recalling the castles he conquered, a panel depicts Castel Focognano: the image shows a circular outer wall, generally round, enclosing another city wall with towers. Subsequently, as reported by Repetti, «after Tarlati, the Bishop Buoso of Ubertini took lordship» and, after the Treaty of 1353 with the Florentine Republic, the Guelph family of Giannellini. The submission to Florence dates back to 1385 and the establishment of the Podestá (chief magistrate) of Castel Focognano dates back to 1404, which affects even the current administrative situation: the town of Castel Focognano still bears this name despite the transfer of the capital to Rassina in 1778. In relation to the material structure of the castle and the archaeological, architectural, historical and artistic elements, a proposed itinerary for visiting the centre may start out from the palace of the Podestá (now rectory) and the adjacent “lodge” , the former an excellent example of architecture and also of sculpture of the early fifteenth century, with elegant columns and emblems, the latter a testament to the following centuries, again thanks to the beautiful collection of stone samples related to heraldry, attesting important and famous Florentine families among those who had administrative positions in Castel Focognano (in addition to the coat of arms of the town of Castel Focognano - the walled castle with crenellated Guelph towers - those of the families of the succeeding Podestá: Strozzi, Donati, Medici, Bradi, Buonarroti).

This architectural complex is the heart of the centre, together with the church of St. John the Evangelist, in its incarnation following the restoration of the eighteenth-nineteenth century, already confirmed in the castle by the second collection of the Rationes Decimarum (1278). Going from the heart of the centre to its outer fortifications, of which important material evidence have been preserved, such as the structure that perhaps itself embodies the symbol of Castel Focognano: the polygonal tower, where the Rural Culture Documentation Centre of the Casentino (Centro di Documentazione sulla Cultura Rurale del Casentino) is currently headquartered. This was a six-faced 11 metre tower; the seventh face was recently built to turn the original border tower into a habitable structure. An open face on the interior was a defensive expedient, common in medieval military architecture, which afforded the advantage of making the tower useful and efficient against an external attack, but militarily unusable on the interior. The tower progressively narrows towards the top; it features a single opening: a circular slit on the northern side. The stonework is rubble masonry with sandstone and limestone cladding arranged in horizontal and parallel lines; the cornered ashlar stones are bigger and display a more accurate finish.

CARDA

carda

Further up along the road that climbs towards the crest of Pratomagno is Carda, an ancient circular village dominated by the Church of St. Flora and Lucilla, elevated to pieve in the eighteenth century.

Initially owned by the Aretine monastery of the same name, the church then passed on to the Ubertini di Valenzano counts who donated it to the Vallombrosan monks of the abbey of St. Trinity in Alpe. In 1385 it was already included in the Florentine territory.

In 1592 the church gained a Baptismal Font and in 1614 the new chapel of the Virgin Mary was inaugurated, with a new altar and the painting “The Mysteries of the Sacred Rosary” by the Aretine Sebastiano Pontenani.

The current building, with a simple gabled façade, was extended in the seventeenth century and completely restructured in 1907, completely changing its appearance.

The interior, a single hall covered by wooden trusses, retains a fragment of the ciborium, carved in sandstone, with a motif of two peacocks at the foot of a cross (an allegory for the immortality of the soul) which can be dated to the first half of the ninth century.

An exquisite altarpiece is present, a tempera panel painting that can be dated to 1425/26 and attributed to Mariotto di Cristofano (San Giovanni Valdarno 1393 – Firenze 1457).

The Lamentation of Christ is depicted in the centre with the Virgin Mary cradling the body. Four saints are on the sides: Giovanni Gualberto (founder of the Vallombrosano Order), Nicola di Bari, Jacopo Maggiore and, last on the right, Bernardo degli Uberti, also known as St. Bernardo di Parma since he was first a Vallombrosan monk, then general abbot of the order, finally bishop of Parma. It was brought here in the last years of the sixteenth century. With its arrival in Carda two figures were added to the painting below the Virgin Mary. These are St. Flora and Lucilla, to whom the church of Carda is dedicated.

Well preserved is also a sixteenth century Virgin Mary and Child (circa 1520) in glazed terracotta, attributed by Mario Salmi to Santi Buglioni. The Virgin Mary, half-length portrait, cradles the Child in her arms, who tenderly looks back at Her, playing with the collar of Her dress. Absent from the main publications on "robbiane" art, this beautiful work is remembered by Mario Salmi, who first proposed the name of Santi Buglioni due to its style, also tracing some Leonardian influences, such as those implied by the suffused and enigmatic melancholy that emerges from the look between the two figures.

SALUTIO

salutio ilbagno

Salutio, name derived from St. Eleuterio, is overlooked by the ruins of the ancient Castle (first mention of it dating back to 1111), that housed the Teri family. It was transformed into a villa in 1855 including the rural farmhouses; the central building that stands inside was built out of the ancient bridge house, just like other castles of the Casentino area that have been transformed into villas.

Salutio is the home town of the abbot Pietro Porcellotti, who to this day provides an irreplaceable source of historical information on the Casentino area in his Critical Illustration of Casentino.

PIEVE DI SANT’ELEUTERIO

Salutio is the home town of the abbot Pietro Porcellotti, who to this day provides an irreplaceable source of historical information on the Casentino area in his Critical Illustration of Casentino.

THE CHURCH OF ST. ELEUTERIO

The Church of St. Eleuterio was originally, without doubt, an Early Christian church, one of the first churches of the diocese of Arezzo built in the fourth-fifth century during the period of the Roman-Byzantine Empire. The fact that is was an Early Christian church can be established first and foremost because it presided over a very vast area, from the slopes of Pratomagno (Badia Santa Trinita) as far as the Catenaia Alps (Vogognano, S. Maria di Catenaia); such an extensive area could not have been left without a baptismal church, especially since the neighbouring Pieve a Socana presided over another equally large area, from Carda to Chitignano. For this reason, we can affirm that Salutio and Pieve a Socana are the Mother Churches of the Middle Casentino.

The building, with its structure composed of large lumps of sandstone, seems attributable to the first Romanesque period, the eleventh century. A single nave, a beautiful occhio a tre strombi and two small windows in the wall without apse, and perfectly oriented to the east. A fragment of carved stone, attributable to the front of the original tabernacle where a cross and two peacocks with an ornament in braid are depicted, brings us back to the Lombard-Carolingian period.

On the side altars there are two paintings dating to the seventeenth century showing the Circumcision (1644) of Tommaso Gorini , Florentine painter influenced by Paolo Guidotti of Pisa, and Our Lady of the Rosary (1619) by Domenico Nannoni, of clear Florentine inspiration. In the sacristy there is a painting of St. Francis by Bernardino Santini, commissioned in 1633 to the Aretine artist along with a St. Eleuterio, now lost. The two works flanked a painting showing the Sacred Trinity by Montevarchian Michelangelo Vestrucci who created it in 1618.

SANTA MARIA DEL BAGNO

The church sits on the hill of the same name to the right of Arno and the river Salutio, at the roots of the Alps of Santa Trinita over the narrow gorge of St. Mamante. The Church of Santa Maria al Bagno was built on the order of Bishop of Arezzo on 21 March 1768, who ordered that the church of St. Bartolommeo a Nassa would transfer to the church of S. Maria al Bagno. Its origin is linked to the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1588 above a rock, on which the beautiful baroque altar was built.

The current building, recently restored, references the shape of oratories on communication routes, with a porch to shelter travellers and the two low portal windows that allowed people to pray even in the absence of the priest or hermit that looked after the church.

RASSINA

RASSINA TORRE

Rassina has been the capital of the municipality since 1778 when Pietro Leopoldo moved the seat of the Town Hall, thus establishing the leading administrative role of this town over the various nearby villages.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the town was an important market for the trade of woollen cloths, in addition to the buying and selling of livestock and cereals; fulling mills and dye works began to be implanted in the municipality, together with factories for weaving of hemp and linen.

Rassina had a remarkable economic growth during World War II due to the establishment, along the Arno river, of a cement plant and Lebole factory in the grand central Piazza Mazzini.

The Piazza combines the new settlements with the old village which, despite having been remodelled, retains its seventeenth and eighteenth century architectural features, common to the other towns of the Casentino area.

BELLAVISTA TOWER

The fortification of the Casentino area for its control occurred from around the ninth century until the end of the fifteenth century, truly fostered after the invasion of the Langobards, to whom all branches of the large family of the Guidi counts belonged. The Guidi counts were able to, with mixed fortunes, maintain political hegemony over a large part of this valley and several other parts of Tuscany and Romagna.

The Casentino area was split in feuds, several belonging to the Guidi counts, others to the Tarlati, Ubertini or belonging to the Church. A fortified structure of control and political as well as economical power lied at the centre of each feud.

Often the fortifications scattered in the area were part of an integrated system of defence of an entire gorge or crossing bordering with other valleys and nevertheless visibly connected with larger and more important fortifications.

As is the case with Castle of Focognano (castrum foconianum), situated on the opposite side of the Arno river valley, directly visible from Bibbiena, from ancient times an outpost of the roads to Pratomagno and Valdarno.

The Castle of Poggiorsona with its supposed watchtower lies near the Castle of Focognano, as does the Castle of Rassina at the bottom of the valley.

Due to its position near the river Arno and the convergence of important communication routes (Verna-Chitignano, Carda-Castel Focognano, Poppi-Bibbiena-Montecchio, Arezzo-Castelnuovo-Subbiano), it was a meeting place and crossroads.

Being an important travel hub both in 1440 at the time of the battle of Anghiari and in 1529 at the time of the siege of Florence, it suffered plundering and destruction; it then became part of the vast Florentine territory until it lost its importance and was abandoned, so much so that today only a few traces of fortified structures remain, the watchtower of Bellavista being one of them.

The watchtower of Bellavista is rectangular with dimensions 4.30x3.30 m, with the longest side aligned to east-west direction, and a height of 7.50 m, characterized by an irregular curtain wall 45/50 cm thick, made up of remnants of local limestone, river pebbles and clay tiles. Originally this structure would have reached a height of 10 m, as revealed by the partially visible portal entrance on the western side, and its four fronts, completely plastered with a lime-based mixture.

On the inside, the slots for the original intermediate wooden loft that divided the patrol spaces can still be seen, despite the recent restoration work carried out in 2007.

In recent times, it is thought that the tower was used as a curing area, due to several holes at the top of the perimeter curtain walls, and the curious presence of an original chimney, built at the intersection of the north and west walls, and for the traces of soot still evident on the internal surface of the walls.

The Castle of Rassina and the tower of Bellavista surely were, once upon a time, an important stronghold for day-time and night-time signalling which connected the entire Casentino area to this place, in the four directions previously highlighted.

PIEVE A SOCANA

pieve socana 36

Pieve a Socana is steeped in 2600 years of history. Its name comes from the religious building dedicated to St. Antonino Martire. Here we see three civilizations: Etruscan, Roman and Christian. The uninterrupted sacredness of the place is documented here by the superimposition of the important buildings of worship, of which the most significant proof is the great Etruscan sacrificial altar in sandstone, belonging to a temple whose staircase remains under the apse of the church. “Socana” is indeed an interesting place name from the point of view of the analysis of Etruscan presence in the town territory and in the Casentino area in general and it is thought to derive from the name “Sacni”, sacred place or temple; no less important the place name of the capital of the municipality: “Rassina” may even be derived from the same ethnic Etruscan people (“Rasna”), taking shape as a typically border place name, meaning it would mark the northern border of the part of Casentino directly controlled by the Etruscans.

If “Socana” refers to Etruscan place names, “Pieve” refers to the medieval period, when the church of St. Antonino was built.

The Church of ST. ANTONINO

Socana, which had one of the largest parishes in the diocese of Arezzo, has been documented since 1004 by Regesto Camaldolese, although the current building is traditionally assigned to the twelfth century. The document, found in the Archive of the State of Florence, dates the start of construction in the year 901, completed by the year one thousand, the year in which, according to the doctrine of millenarianism, the end of the world would take place.

So the walls of the sacred building were built strong and solid so that they could withstand an earthquake or other natural disaster.

The material used for the construction of the church was partly taken from the Etruscan temple (large stones are clearly visible on the right wall of the church and the baptistry), and partly quarried from the near Poggio Maggio.

The building was created with 5 bays and divided into three naves.

Over the centuries the church has undergone several changes, firstly shortening it and then transforming it, coated with plaster that hid most of the stone walls and with additional altars, like the colossal altar that hid the middle apse.

In 1967 the restoration work began under the watchful eye of the parish priest Fr. Alfio Scarini, work which has restored the purity, simplicity and harmony of the Romanesque architecture.

The building, reduced to less than half of its original length (the façade was reconstructed and moved back in the sixteenth century), is divided into three naves and three bays with a final apse.

A sense of profound harmony passes through strong pillars that lightly support the great arches and the smaller ones of the presbytery. The pillars are subtly decorated with palmettes or braids, recurring motifs in art from Lombardy.

The wall cladding of the semicircular apse, of the sides and of the last two pillars consist of blocks of limestone and correspond to a first construction phase that can be dated to the twelfth - thirteenth century, with the remaining part in sandstone attributable to the end of the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

ETRUSCAN ALTAR

During restoration works carried out over the years 1966-72, an Etruscan temple, 40 metres long and 18.40 wide, rose to the surface with twelve temple steps and the Etruscan altar.

Unfortunately the temple lies under the existing church and inside exploration hasn't been possible. It was only possible to ascertain that the orientation of the temple would have been the reverse of the existing Church, to the east.

It is nevertheless feasible that the Templar podium would have been a structure of about 40m long and 18 wide, preceded by a large, obviously rectangular, terrace (rather than square like other Northern Etruscan Templar platforms).

The “wide” entrance steps to the temple consists of twelve steps framed by two quadrangular bases, mondanati The steps of the temple are made up of local tuff stone with an under layer of supporting rock.

The Altar is rectangular, more than a metre high, 5 metres long and 3.75 metres wide.

These dimensions make it the largest known Etruscan altar, along with that of so-called “monument D” of Marzabotto.

A round cavity features at its centre and it is built on three floors with stones bound together by lead clamps with dovetail joints. Here the Etruscans of Casentino, Arezzo, Cortona e Chiusi came to offer animal sacrifices and bring gifts to the gods.

Indeed teeth of wild boars, goats, lambs, and many animal bones were found during the excavations of this sacrificial altar. The excavation also brought to light twenty antefixes, some with beautiful polychrome and dating from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, some others with the head of Minerva, dating from the second century BC and similar to a type common in Tarquinia, Talamone and Chiusi.
In front of the Altar there are a few rooms from Roman times and a cylindrical tower that dates back to the first century B.C.: this was a signal tower and there are five more on the way to Arezzo. By day, they signalled with mirrors, by night with fire (torch light).

During the excavations numerous fragments (tiled eaves and antefixes) belonging to the terracotta decoration of the temple were discovered. They can be attributed to two distinct phases, the first (the fifth and fourth centuries BC) in "strict" style, the second (the third century BC) characterized by Hellenistic imprint.

Very interesting are some large disk-shaped limestone artefacts, removed in antiquity and unearthed south of the Church; many are fragmentary and two are decorated, so that it is presumed they had a cultural function, either as containers for votive offerings or as votive offerings themselves. Between 13 and 18 cm high and 87 and 112 cm wide, two artefacts carry the same inscriptions kreinie or kreine; it was then possible to assume that these were offered as a gift by the same family, which could have held patronage of the sanctuary for over a century.