A noble City in the heart of Tuscany

Tuscany is one of the most famous regions in Europe and has one of the richest histories. San Miniato, the XX mile City, has always been a part of this history. This title comes from its special geographical position.

San Miniato is located along the Via Francigena (the road from France) that connected northern Europe to Rome during the Middle Ages and it was travelled by an uninterrupted flow of men, armies, trade, ideas and culture. Situated along this route in the heart of the Arno River Valley, San Miniato was at the intersection of the roads between Florence and Pisa, Lucca and Siena, Pistoia, San Gimignano, Volterra and Vinci also lay within these twenty miles.

It is not surprising, therefore, that San Miniato was a favoured city of emperors like Frederick II of Swabia and Popes such as Gregory V and Eugene IV. In 1533, for example, as Michelangelo wrote in one of his manuscripts, he met with Pope Clement VII in San Miniato where the pontiff commissioned him to paint the Sistine Chapel.

A few years later, Michel de Montaigne stopped there and recorded the visit in his work "Travel to Italy". It may be that another great traveller, Wolfang Goethe, whose journey between Florence and Siena was documented, stopped to visit San Miniato al Tedesco, the Rocca, the castle of his fellow countryman Frederick II and the sixteenth-century Accademia degli Affidati.

The entire history of Tuscany from the Etruscans to the Grand Duchy of Hapsburg-Lorraine, found a meeting point in San Miniato. 

Two thousand years of history of an ancient town

The original core of the city dates back to the 8th century when, according to the original document from 713 kept in the Archivio Arcivescovile (Archiepiscopal Archives) in Lucca, seventeen Longobards built a church there dedicated to the martyr Miniato.

The city's origin is therefore Germanic, and since the Middle Ages it would be known as San Miniato al Tedesco.

In the span of five centuries San Miniato grew as a medieval bastion, from when Otto I of Saxony in 962 made it one of the seats of his imperial government, up to when Frederick II of Swabia built his castle there in 1218, making it the focal point for central Italy's tax collection.

It will be another German, Maria Maddalena of Austria, wife of Cosimo dei Medici, to help San Miniato by making it the bishop's see in 1622. In gratitude, a large marble statue was erected in her honor. Infortunately, it was destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century by the San Miniato Jacobins during the French Revolution and today only a large fragment of it remains near the Franciscan convent.

Such a history could not but leave an important artistic and architectural heritage.

The people of San Miniato

Frederick II of Swabia was a friend to San Miniato, and stayed there more than once, as mentioned before. The early building of the Franciscan Convent, one of the most imposing and important buildings in the city, was said to be the work of the same St. Francis when he was just over thirty years old.  It was built over the ruins of the protoromanesque church of San Miniato, that gave origin to the city around the year 700.

Repetti, in his Choreographic Dictionary of Tuscany, defines San Miniato as the "breeding-ground of illustrious men". Matilde di Canossa and Francesco Sforza were born there, the latter giving rise to the Visconti family of Milan. Five centuries later another man from San Miniato, the senator and famous oncologist Pietro Bucalossi, will become mayor of the Lombard city. In 1559 Ludovico Cardi, the Tuscan Correggio, also was born in San Miniato. Known as "il Cigoli", his works hang in the Uffizi, Louvre, Prado and Hermitage museums.

The Corsican branch of the Bonaparte family is discended from a noble San Miniato family as well. Twice the young Napoleon lived in San Miniato with relatives, and he returned again in 1797 during the italian campaign, when he interrupted his advance and held a council of war in his Monsignor uncle's house in the square having the same name. Newspaper articles of the time kept in the archives excitedly reported this extraordinary fact.

San Miniato was where Giosué Carducci, a young secondary school professor, started his career as a poet which would eventually earn him the Nobel prize. Here, on the top of the hill, he published his first collection of verses: The Resources af San Miniato al Tedesco, printed by Ristori. Seventy years later another great poet, Mario Luzi, will take the place Carducci once held as a teacher.

Art and history, culture and poetry. As unusual combination that still produces effects. The Taviani brothers' motion pictures, (both were born in the city centre), have more than once told the story of San Miniato as a metaphor of the world, such as the microcosm of the fratricidal war in their film "Notte di San Lorenzo" (Night of San Lorenzo).