The history of Impruneta
Impruneta sits above the Greve valley, its record stitched together from a theologian's 1477 burial, a basilica rebuilt after the bombing of 1944, and a nearby farm ridge whose real history lies a mile and a half off at Villa di Mondeggi, held in turn by monks, the Bardi, Portinari and della Gherardesca families, and Florence's province from 1964.
Villa di Mondeggi, about a mile and a half from this ridge above Impruneta, traces to a 1300s building recorded by monks from Vallombrosa Abbey, passed through the Bardi, Portinari and della Gherardesca families, and was bought by Florence's province in 1964 before becoming a farming commons occupied since 2014.
Four families owned Villa di Mondeggi before its sale
On the open ridge above Impruneta, the nearest real story sits about a mile and a half away at Villa di Mondeggi. Monks from Vallombrosa Abbey left the earliest written trace of the villa, built sometime in the 1300s. The Bardi family of Florence owned it first. They sold it in 1427 to the Portinari family, who later gave it to a hospital. The della Gherardesca family bought it in 1538 and held it for four centuries, rebuilding and expanding the house in 1862. They sold the villa in 1938, and it passed through two more private owners before Florence's provincial government bought it in 1964.
Debt crisis pushed the province to sell Mondeggi's farmland
The provincial government ran Mondeggi's vineyards, olive groves, and farmland through a public company for decades. In 2009, that company went into liquidation. By 2012, Florence's province announced it would sell the villa and the land. Italy's debt crisis was pushing the government to sell off public farmland across the country, and Mondeggi became a test case for what would happen to it.
A farming movement wrote a charter for commons land
In November 2013, a farming movement called Genuino Clandestino picked Mondeggi as a place to fight back. Genuino Clandestino harvested the abandoned olives and gave the oil away for free. A new group formed, called "Verso Mondeggi Bene Comune, Fattoria senza Padroni," meaning "Toward Mondeggi as a Commons, a Farm Without Masters." People from the towns around Impruneta joined it. In January 2014, they wrote a charter laying out their plan: turn public land, left to rot, into land managed as a commons rather than sold off or abandoned again.
Occupiers farm Mondeggi collectively without a single owner
Since 2014, that group has occupied Mondeggi's fields and some of its buildings. They grow olives and grapes and work the arable land using organic, small-scale farming methods, run collectively rather than by a single owner.
Closer to where you stand, Impruneta's own history includes a darker chapter. In July 1944, Allied bombing destroyed the town's Basilica of Santa Maria d'Impruneta, the medieval church that had housed a painting believed miraculous for centuries. What stands in the town square today is mostly a postwar rebuild. And in August 1968, near Impruneta, a farmhand named Antonio Lo Bianco and a woman named Barbara Locci were shot dead in a parked car, a killing later tied to Italy's unsolved "Monster of Florence" murders.
The ridge stays open farmland, with Mondeggi's occupied fields and rebuilt basilica both within a couple of miles.
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