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Bagno a Ripoli, Tuscany

The Municipal territory of Bagno a Ripoli has a surface area of 74.09 square kilometres and extends along the left bank of the Arno as far as the borders of Firenze. Seat of law from XIII century then capital of Podesta Office and eventually a large Leopoldina Community. It reached its present day territorial order in 1968 with the aggregation of a part of the suppressed municipality of Galluzzo after having, during the 1800s, ceded to Firenze three districts on the right of the Arno (Settignano, Varlungo and Rovezzano).

The Municipality is articulated on three major centres: apart from Bagno a Ripoli, Antella and Grassina. The capital owes part of its name to the presence, in Roman times, of a thermal establishment, whose remains were found during the XVII century, while the place name Ripoli was derived from its position (Ripa [steep bank]), close to the river, of an alluvial plane brought about by the modification of the flow of the Arno; in the XIII century it was the Seat of the League of Ripoli, a federation of rural bodies with administrative and military functions.
The other centre we need to mention is that of Antella, whose antique parish church represented an aggregation centre which gave life, in the course of time, to the actual town. Grassina seems to have had other origins, developing perhaps as a market of the castle of Montacuto which overlooked it, but growing, mostly between the XVIII and XIX centuries, because of the development of traffic and thanks the Firenze laundry industry. Deserving a mention is the fact that the territory of the Ripoli plain was (and is also shown in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci) crossed by a secondary branch of the Arno (the so called Bisarno), which formed an island between Varlungo on the right bank and the parish of San Piero in Palco on the left bank.

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