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Art and History of Monte San Savino in Tuscany Italy

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.

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 or ). 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 .

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