The Castle of Gargonza, with its small ovoid-shaped agricultural village consisting of about twentyhouses, surrounded by walls on a prominent rock formation, with a door to defend the entranceand a tower that dominates the internal square and the Romanesque church from the thirteenthcentury, is located on the hills overlooking the Val di Chiana, between Arezzo and Siena, in themunicipality of Monte San Savino.
Quote:”Gargonza, located in the heart of the Tuscan hills, is a 13th century fortified medieval villagearound the tower, the church and the well, enclosing the houses within a thick wall that the enemycould not break through …”
The first records of Gargonza as a fortified village in the Val di Chiana date back to 1150:a quote told of a fortified castle along the road from Arezzo to Siena,which is the same castle where Dante Alighieri spent his exile.In its long history the most important event is perhaps that of the passage of Dante Alighieri in1302, as the historian Leonardo Bruni recalls in his “Life of Dante”.
From 1300 the Castle of Gargonza was a fortified village in the hands of the “Ghibellines” andfrom 1444 it became an agricultural community dedicated to the woods and “governed” by wisecivic statutes for 300 years.
Wanted by the Guelphs and Ghibellines, in the 15th century the Castle of Gargonza wasknown as the village dedicated to the cultivation of the forest as well as to the production of wool. Gargonza, formerly a fief of the Ubertini Counts, passed to the Republic of Siena and then to theSignoria of Florence, to arrive at the end of the 17th century in the house of the Marquis Corsi,ancestors of the current owners. During the seventeenth century the castle became an organized farm of 900 hectares with thirtythreefarms and houses for peasants and their families. In addition to the guesthouses, the townalready had a parish, a canons’ house, a school, an oil mill, stables and four bread ovens (stillworking).
Then at the end of the 1700s it became a farm, until the rural exodus occurred after World War II,with the end of sharecropping.After two hundred years of prosperity, during the first half of the twentieth century, the Castle wasabandoned by the community that lived there, leaving for a better life in the city.
Website: Castle of Gargonza
