MONTE SAN
SAVINO
Monte
San Savino overlook the green
undulated fields of the Chiana
Valley from the top of its hill.
The first urban settlement as
origin around 1100, but a further
century had to pass before Monte
San Savino could be considered
centre of a certain social,
political and cultural importance
of Tuscany in those times. Only
later on, during the Renaissance
epoch thanks to the Mecenas -
like generosity of the Ciocchi di
Monte, the most powerful local
family, Monte San Savino reaches
the summit of creative expansion
bearing by a great number of
works of art clear witness of
such a fine
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originality
and sober magnificence to be early
consecrated as a suggestive and
fascinating centre of art where not too
much later the great sculptor Andrea
Contucci, called "Sansovino", was
born.
Monte San
Savino unites its artistically vitality
with a remarkable sense for business and
commerce mainly thanks to the undertaking
spirit of the members of a Jewish
community who established themselves in
the town in the 15th century and remained
there till 1799 when they were expelled
during the French occupation. During its
history the little town meets with various
vicissitudes: allied with Florence it is
destroyed on the 11th of May 1326 by the
aretine Bishop Guido Tarlati. Later on,
rebuilt by the aretines themselves it must
undergo the dominion of Perugia, Siena and
Arezzo, and at the end, of Florence under
the Medici who govern it for over two
hundred years till 1737, i.e. the
beginning of the Lorrain supremacy which
lasts until the unification of
Italy.
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Like
the surrounding countryside,
Monte San Savino has a long and
eventful history. At the end of
the last century, the
archaeologist G.F. Gamurrini,
working in the outlying areas of
Castellare, Pastina, and
Vertighe, found many traces of
Etruscan civilisation, indicating
that there had been agricultural
settlements here in the 4th
century BC.
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During the war between Marius and Sulla
these little settlements were then razed
to the ground, marking the end of Etruscan
civilisation.
The
Aretini voters, as they had been known,
were followed by Sulla’s men, who
then built a new castle which they called
Area alta (in the Middle Ages this became
<Arialta> or <Ajalta>). And
thus, in the imperial age, the little town
was born. As Christianity spread, before
the 6th century AD, in the locality known
as the Font of Sant’Egidio, at the
foot of the castle, a rural church was
built, dedicated to Saint Savino, bishop
of Chiusi, who had lived at the beginning
of the 5th century. Towards the end of the
l2th century, when the church was moved to
the village, the castle took the name of
its patron saint.
During the
Middle Ages Monte San Savino sided
squarely with the Guelphs, and therefore
was in constant conflict with Ghibelline
Arezzo. Guelphs exiled from the larger
town took refuge in the village and,
together with the Florentines and the
Senese, organised the expedition of 1288,
which ended with the inglorious defeat of
the Guelphs at nearby Pieve al Toppo
(mentioned in Dante’s Inferno, XIII,
120). The next year, after the battle of
Campaldino, the town was occupied by the
victorious Florentine Guelphs, who held it
as a constant weapon turned against
Arezzo. The hapless Savinesi were to pay
dearly for this tactic: on 11 May 1325
Guido Tarlati, bishop of Arezzo, rode into
the town, then ordered its total
destruction. As the fourteenth century
chronicler Giovanni Villani wrote; Tarlati
commanded that <not a stone should be
left upon a stone; and though there were
more than a thousand inhabitants, all
should be dispersed so that they could
never rebuild their town>.
One of the
bas-relief panels of the tomb of Bishop
Tarlati, in the Duomo of Arezzo, recalls
this event: we see the Savinesi paying
homage to the victorious prelate, while
his soldiers demolish the castle. But the
town soon did rise from its ashes, and,
ironically, with the help of Arezzo, aware
of its strategic importance. Monte San
Savino, a few years later, was one of the
Lands left to Perugia when, in 1344,
Florence occupied Arezzo; in the following
forty years, the town was dominated
alternately by Perugia, Arezzo, and Siena.
Finally, in 1388, Monte San Savino signed
an alliance with the Signoria of Florence,
thus becoming a Florentine outpost,
jutting into the southern part of the
state of Siena, dose to the Papal States.
This vanguard fortress was useful for
Florence, but the Savinesi were again
victimised.
Every time
an army moved up from the south to attack
Florence, Monte San Savino was the first
to undergo the consequences. And the
damage the town suffered between 1388 and
1550 was enormous; whenever troops went
past, the Iand was systematically
devastated, Livestock stolen. And for a
settlement living off agriculture all this
meant famine, soaring prices and
plague.
Harvests
were severely damaged during the siege by
King Ladislao of Naples (who, unable to
win military successes, took his revenge
by destroying crops, earning from the
peasants the nickname <Re Guasta
grain>, King Grain-spoiler).
Destruction also followed the siege of the
army of the League (1479), the Vitelli
revolt in Arezzo (1502), the sack of Rome,
and the conquest of Florence by the
Emperor’s troops
(1527-30).
Meanwhile
a local family, the Di Monte, had
established itself in Rome, where it soon
reached a high position in the
aristocracy. Antonio Di Monte, created
cardinal in 1511, was to become one of the
closest advisers of Julius Il, and his
nephew Giovan Maria was to become Pope in
1550, omissis Baldovino, the brother of
Julius III, was named Count of San Savino
and Gargonza, Palazzuolo, and Alberoro,
and granted the investiture of the fief on
condition that he would erect no
fortifications there and, every year,
would give Florence a silver cup as a
token of fealty. He was succeeded by
Fabiano, but in 1570 the Di Monte family
died out. From being a County, in 1604,
Monte San Savino became a March, under the
Orsini family of Pitigliano. But the
Marquisette of San Savino did not enjoy a
long life: in 1644, after the death of the
last Orsini,
Monte San
Savino was raised to a Principality and
was given to Mattias De’ Medici,
governor of Siena. who held it until 1667?
He was succeeded, as ruler of the
Principality of Monte San Savino, by the
Grand-duchess Vittoria della Rovere of
Urbino, wife of Ferdinando. She held the
title until 1691, the year of her
death.
A period
of independence followed; but, inevitably,
Monte San Savino shared the destiny of the
whole region and was absorbed by the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany in 1747, ending the
feudal period.
In those
two centuries the city’s appearance
did not change; but its inhabitants has
enjoyed two exceptional experiences: there
had been a rich artistic life on the one
hand and a complex development of banks
and commerce on the other. One local son,
Andrea Sansovino, had gone beyond the
borders of the little territory and long
before his death in 1529, had become a
leading figure in Italian art. After
Andrea, sculptor and architect, Monte San
Savino produced at least four important
painters: Niccolò Soggi (a pupil of
Perugino), Stefano Veltroni and Orazio
Porta (of the school of Vasari), Ulisse
Giocchi (an eclectic, baroque artist), as
well as the goldsmith and sculptor
Accursio Baldi. No other village of the
Val di Chiana, except Cortona, can boast
such artistic vitality.
The
town’s commercial development began
in the mid-l7th century thanks to a Jewish
community, which settled in the village,
creating a synagogue, a ghetto, and a
cemetery. For almost two centuries this
community controlled all trade in cloth,
silver, wool, not only in the valley but
also as far afield as Cortona.
During the
anti-French uprisings known as the
<Viva Maria> movement in Arezzo in
1799, almost all the Jewish merchants to
whom the French had granted civil
liberties were forced to emigrate. With
them went the poet Salomone Florentine,
then the administrator of the community.
In 1802 the French returned, incorporating
Tuscany into French territory, and in
twelve years, through drastic methods,
they established various innovations. As
elsewhere they instituted the Bureau of
Records, the Bureau of Mortgages, and the
Registry.
The
monasteries were suppressed, and so in
1810 the Augustinian, Camaldolese, and
Franciscan monks had to leave the town, as
did the Poor Clares.
Meanwhile
the idea of national unity was beginning
to ripen also in Monte San Savino, and
several Savinesi took an active part in
the Risorgimento. Norberto Coradeschi
fought in the war of Independence in 1848
and with Garibaldi until 1866, and
Ferdinando Zanetti, a local surgeon and
patriot, operated on Garibaldi after he
was wounded at Aspromonte. In 1859 the
Grand Duke left Tuscany, and the following
year, after plebiscites, the whole region
became part of the Kingdom of
Italy.
During the
past century the town again made a
considerable contribution to Italian
culture, producing the poet and critic
Giulio Salvadori, one of the first
professors at the Catholic University of
Milan (a movement to have him beatified is
now in progress) and the scientist
Giuseppe Sanarelli, discoverer of the
vaccine against yellow fever. The
archaeologist G.F. Gamurrini, the first to
carry out systematic studies of Etruscan
civilisation, is considered a Savinese by
adoption.
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