|  Inhabitants in 1991: 24.635
 Situated
in high Maremma, the municipal territory extends for 42,94 square
kilometres in an alluvial plain crossed by the last tract of the same
name river and along ten or so kilometres of coast. It was constituted
in autonomous municipality in 1906, with the detachment of the
municipal of Bibbona, of which it had become capital since 1881.
Archaeological digs from the 1800s and more recent times have proven
that the territory was inhabited in the Etruscan and Roman eras,
while according to tradition, the foundation of a villa on the place of
the present day town should be of the Etruscan family Volterrana dei Cecina.
In the Dark Ages the city of Cecina, as many others in the northern
Maremma, were placed under the Lordship of the Gherardesca, but in the
XII century after a long controversy concluding with an Imperial ruling
(1121) it became almost entirely the possession of the Bishop
of Pisa. It is presumably from this era that the decline started,
determined above all by the fact that the water regime of the Cecina,
no longer regulated, turned the territory into a marshland, with
the consequent augmentation of malaria and the turning of the once fertile
land into a wilderness. Until the XVIII century the site – practically
abandoned – saw sporadic attempts of land reclaims: the most
important were those of the Medicei finished in 1500s (construction of
a little port, a bridge, an ironworks and a farmhouse) and that of the
Marquis Ginori, who acquired the farm in 1738. Only with the profound
reclamation works undertaken by Leopoldo II in 1833 did the zone
start to rapidly repopulate. Between the end of the 1800s and the beginning
of the 1900s the village settled on the via Emilia and touched by the
Livorno to Vada railway, revealed a growing economic and social dynamism
which turned into a booming political, cultural and labour association:
co-operatives were born, the Public Assistance was constituted and a theatre
and arena for summer spectacles were created . The fortune of Marina di
Cecina also began to be outlined in that, as documented the romances of
Carlo Cassola, in the 1930s it was already affirmed as a summer resort.
In the last war the centre of Cecina was destroyed by two thirds, but
reconstruction work was rapid.
Places to visit:
The Archaeological Park of San Vincenzino,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Cecina there have come to light
important ruins of a vast complex from the Roman era. |
Historical info reproduced upon authorization of Regione Toscana - Dipartimento della Presidenza E Affari Legislativi e Giuridici
Translated by Ann Mountford |
