Terra di Toscana www.terraditoscana.com

Towns of the area

36 / 43

Scandicci

Town web Hotels Farmholidays Restaurants

Inhabitants in 1991: 52.523

The municipal territory of Scandicci extends for 59,59 square kilometres in the hilly area of Valdarno Fiorentino It received its present day denomination in 1929 and with this it absorbed the territory which had previously belonged to the suppressed municipalities of Casellina and Torri; in 1939 the district of Signano from the municipality of Firenze was added to it.

The oldest mention of the capital goes back to 978 when the Countess Willa mother of the Marquis Ugo di Toscano, donated to the Fiorentina Abbey certain assets in the Val di Greve among which was the Scandicci Castle with the annexed church and thirty manses belonging to the same court. It is said that the castle (then called Scandicci Alto) was probably, since the Dark Ages, one of the many fortresses that belong to the feudal lineage of Cadolingi. In the two centuries after the year 1000 more than once Emperors and Popes confirmed the donation of the castle to the Monks of the Abbey, but the town did not appear to have developed greatly, as in the 1300 it was nothing more than a small village dependent on the parish of Santa Maria a Greve and still was, until in the 1800s, when the Seat of the huge municipalities of Casellina and Torri were transferred to it. From the second half of the last century the town began rapidly to grow, but did not abandon its essentially agricultural connections. By now a well populated agricultural and working class centre, Scandicci lived dramatic times during Fascism with the incursions of the "squads" who tried to impose with violence that which was contrary to the democratic tradition of the town. If the clandestine opposition to the regime did not die down for the whole of the twenty years, it reached its rightful conclusion in the resistance when the Scandicci partisan formation contributed highly in the struggle against the nazifascism, participating among other things to the liberation of Firenze. Starting from the 70s the municipality has seen a very accentuated popular urbanistic growth being a satellite city of Firenze.

Places to visit:
S. Giusto, church with antique origins remade in the 1600s.
S. Maria, parochial already mentioned in 1070, suffered various changes over the years, the most important in 1926. The interior preserves and Glass and Terracotta from the studio of Della Robbia.
S. Martino alla Palma, outside the town, a very ancient church recorded from the X century and restructured in the 1700s.

Historical info reproduced upon authorization of Regione Toscana - Dipartimento della Presidenza E Affari Legislativi e Giuridici
Translated by Ann Mountford


Terraditoscana © Polimedia - All rights reserved
Press registration n. 5528 10/11/2006 - Editor Polimedia - P.IVA 06790950486