Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy
Castles & the Guidi counts
A valley you can read as a chain of towers.
Before it was a national park or a place for sagre, the Casentino was a frontier of castles, and one family held nearly all of them. You can still stand under their towers, and one of their guests, exiled from Florence, wrote the valley into the most famous poem in the language. This is the shortest way to read the Casentino as history rather than scenery.
The Guidi counts
For three hundred years, from the eleventh century to the fourteenth, the Casentino belonged to one family: the Conti Guidi. They built or held a castle above almost every village, taxed the roads and the mills, took in exiles and changed sides as it suited them. Poppi, Romena, Porciano, Battifolle; the valley is still read most easily as a chain of their towers. Florence eventually swallowed all of it, but the stones stayed.
Poppi, the one that survived
The Castello dei Conti Guidi at Poppi is the best kept castle in the valley and one of the finest in Tuscany, its tall keep watching the whole plain. Tradition gives its design to the same hand as the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Inside there is a courtyard of coats of arms, a chapel with fourteenth-century frescoes and the old Rilliana library. Below it, on the flat ground at Certomondo, the Battle of Campaldino was fought in June 1289.
Dante was here
A young Dante Alighieri rode at Campaldino as a Florentine cavalryman, and years later, exiled and homeless, he came back to the valley as a guest of the Guidi. He put the Casentino into the Divine Comedy: the counterfeiter Maestro Adamo, who forged the Florentine florin at the castle of Romena, is left to burn with thirst in the Inferno, dreaming of the little streams that run down from these green hills. The ruined tower of Romena and the restored one at Porciano, above Stia, are both his.
Seeing them today
Poppi is open most of the year and easy to reach; Romena and Porciano keep shorter, seasonal hours, so check before you drive up. Many of the castles come alive for a day or two a year with medieval fairs, concerts in the courtyard and re-enactments of Campaldino. Here is what is on in the valley now.
- Archaeology night guided visit
- Painting exhibition: Memorie Mediterranee
- Falcon show at the Palagio
- Teatro del Fiume: All in Flames
- Teatro del Fiume: Hansel and Gretel
- Ridi che ti passa comedy
The Battle of Campaldino was fought on 11 June 1289, in sight of Poppi. Among the Florentine cavalry was a twenty-four-year-old who would later describe the day in the Divine Comedy: Dante Alighieri.