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Castelfiorentino in Tuscany

The territory of the Municipal of Castelfiorentino extends for 66.56 square kilometres in Val d'Elsa in a hilly area. Medieval Podesta Office, it suffered in the course of the centuries several adjustments to its extension and became Seat of the community in 1774, reaching its present day aspect in 1876 with the aggregation of the districts of Castelnuovo and Colano, detached from the municipal of Montaione.

The first nucleus of Castelfiorentino was the castle situated where, in present times, the highest point of the town is positioned, overhanging the village of Timignano and it was nominated as such until 1149 when, in a document it was recorded for the first time as Castelfiorentino. Around the year 1000 it was a feudal possession of the Alberti Counts, but already at the beginning of the XII century the Firenze Bishops began to have jurisdiction and even though Federico Barbarossa in 1164 and Ottone IV in 1210 confirmed the Lordship to the Alberti, in actual fact the Fiorentino Episcopate continued to exercise full Lordship; the people tried more than once to free themselves of this subordination (and for this they were also affected by excommunication in 1218), but independence (if this is what it can be called) was acquired only towards the middle of the XIII century, when the centre and the surrounding territory entered under the guardianship of the Firenze republic becoming Seat of a Podesta and capital of one of the leagues into which the Fiorentino county was divided .Distressed more than once in the course of the 1300s by the invasions of the mercenary soldiers, the castle was annexed to the Episcopate of Certaldo in 1415. In 1495 Carlo VIII and il Savonarola met there, in 1529 Castelfiorentino suffered severe damage in the war which brought the Medici to the principality and, again molested from 1552 to 1557 in the course of the struggle to conquer Siena. Since then, a hardworking rural centre in the ambience of a by this time consolidated Toscano State, it had the fortune to not live anymore hard days.

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