Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy
The history that is still standing
A battle, two saints, and a bolt of orange wool.
The Casentino has spent most of its history out of the way, which is exactly why so much of it is still standing. No one flattened these hills to build something newer. Here are four places where you can put a hand on the history itself: a battlefield, a mountain sanctuary, a forest hermitage, and a wool mill.
Dante at Campaldino, 1289
Below the castle at Poppi the valley flattens out into farmland, and on 11 June 1289 that flat ground was a battlefield. The Guelphs of Florence met the Ghibellines of Arezzo here, at Campaldino, and broke them in an afternoon. Riding with the Florentine cavalry, in his mid-twenties, was Dante Alighieri.
He never forgot it. Soldiers, horses and the particular fear of a first battle turn up decades later in the Comedy, and Dante sends more than one Casentino soul down into the Inferno to argue about what actually happened that day on the plain. You can still walk the field. Nothing marks it as dramatically as the poem does, which is more or less the point: history here does not need a monument, because it is still just a field.
Francis at La Verna, 1213 and 1224
In 1213 a local count, Orlando Cattani, gave Francis of Assisi the bare rock of La Verna, high on the eastern crest, ‘for the salvation of his soul’ and because he thought it was a good place to pray. He was right. Francis kept coming back, and in September 1224, on a ledge of that same mountain, he is said to have received the stigmata: the wounds of the crucifixion, in his own hands and feet.
The sanctuary that grew up around the rock is still a working Franciscan community, not a museum, and the chapel built over the spot is usually cold even in August. You can visit the ledge itself, the Sasso Spicco, and the beech and fir forest the friars have left standing around it for eight hundred years.
Camaldoli and the eight centuries of silence
In 1012 a Ravenna monk named Romuald built a hermitage in the fir forest above what is now Poppi: five cells and a chapel, high up and hard to reach, which was rather the point. A few years later he added a hospice down the hill for travellers and the sick, and the two together became Camaldoli, hermitage and monastery, each with its own rhythm to this day.
What the monks actually left behind is the forest itself. They have managed it, on and off, for a thousand years, longer than almost any institution in Europe has managed anything, and it is a large part of why the Casentino’s woods are as old and as whole as they are. The Foreste Casentinesi national park exists, in effect, because someone kept saying no to the axe since before Florence was a republic.
Stia and the cloth that dressed a city
Wool made Florence rich, and a good part of that wool was finished here, in the Casentino, where the fast streams off the Pratomagno could turn a fulling mill. Stia had one of the largest in the valley, the Lanificio di Stia, and by the twentieth century it was still weaving the thick, brushed, brightly coloured cloth the valley is known for: panno casentino, easiest to spot in its trademark burnt orange, though it comes in green and red too.
The mill closed in the 1980s but the fabric did not: it still turns up in coats from Florence to Tokyo, and the mill building in Stia now holds a museum of the wool trade that made this quiet valley, for a few centuries, one of the engines of Florentine money.
A battlefield, a stigmata, an eight-hundred-year forest and a bolt of orange wool: none of it moved, and you can visit all four in a single day.