.
The territory in which Campiglia
Marittima rises was intensely inhabited by the Etruscans,
who set up some of their forges here. In the Thirties,
the first kilns were discovered in which the Etruscans
worked the metals in which the subsoil of the surrounding
mountains abounds: copper, iron and even silver and
zinc. The Romans did not know how to exploit these riches
as the Etruscans had done, and the area went into decline.
The inhabitants abandoned the villages, and the countryside
was no longer cultivated. Nevertheless, numerous findings
of the Roman epoch, among which a great quantity of
coins of the era of Caesar Augustus, lead us to believe
that the hills around Campiglia were inhabited by several
illustrious families attracted by the beauty of the
places and by the favorable climate.
The Lombard epoch involved a further
depopulation of the territory, which began its rebirth
around the year one thousand. From a document of 1004
we know that Campiglia was a castle belonging to the
della Gherardesca family, and the fiefdom must have
developed rapidly, if in 1138 it gave hospitality to
Pope Innocent II on his return from the Council of Pisa.
However much the counts of the della Gherardesca family
exercised a feudal dominion over Campiglia as over other
villages in the Maremma, already in the 13th century
the castle depended on the Republic of Pisa, which established
a magistrate, a judge and a notary there. In 1406 Pisa
signed the treaty of its first surrender to Florence,
and Campiglia was one of the castles made over to the
Florentine Republic.
Despite several attempts at revolt,
Campiglia yielded to the new dominion, which at least
guaranteed it from attempts at assault on the part of
foreign troops. In 1447 and 1448, in fact, the king
of Naples, Alphonse of Aragon, tried twice to take possession
of the castle and the village; but the defense of the
inhabitants of Campiglia and of the Florentine army
was strenuous, and the castle did not fall into enemy
hands. The subsequent history of Campiglia was no longer
studded with wars, but with terrible plagues that decimated
the population and transformed what at one time had
been a thriving stronghold in the south of the Grand
Duchy into a village surrounded with deserted districts
in which malaria mowed down its victims. Campiglia's
modern history began with the important reclaiming of
Maremma lands, which finally made the villages inhabitable
once more.
The section of the Leghorn coast where
San Vincenzo is found today had been inhabited since
the early Palaeolithic era, but it was with the arrival
of the Etruscans that the area knew a remarkable civilization.
In fact, San Vincenzo is in the vicinity of the promontory
of Populonia, the seat of a powerful Etruscan temtory
ruled by a lucomon. The presence of metals within the
territory of San Vincenzo' and particularly on the slopes
of Mount Calvi, meant that the Etruscans developed here
a considerable activity of extraction and fusion, numerous
traces of which have been discovered.
Once the Romans conquered the Etruscans,
the Aurelian Way passed by San Vincenzo, and although
there is no certain information, it seems that a village
and a landing stage were founded on the spot. Instead,
it is definite that in the 9th century in the locality
of San Vincentium there used to exist a small shelter
for pilgrims, probably at the origin of the founding
of a church, information of which we have starting in
the 13th century. In 1304 the Pisans had a watch tower
erected with a fortress which, two centuries later,
in 1505, was the scene of the epilogue to Pisa's attempted
revolt against Florence. Right under the tower of San
Vincenzo, in fact, the battle tool: place between the
Florentine army and that of the condottiere Bartolomeo
d'Alviano, who was leading his troops to the aid of
Pisa that was under siege. The battle was then immortalised
by Giorgio Vasari in one of the frescoes in the "Salone
dei Cinquccento" of Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.
In successive centuries, San Vincenzo followed the fortunes
of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
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