Civitella in Val di Chiana
Lying close to the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, Civitella lies in the Val di Chiana (valley). An historically fascinating town, it was important in Roman times, but became a fortified town in the sixth century, under the Lombards. The town today is perhaps the best-preserved of these early central Italian fortress cities. The elliptical shape of the town walls today exactly reflects the configuration of the Lombard military towns of the time. Civitella passed to the Bishops of Arezzo in the eleventh century and was renamed Civitella del Vescovo, or ‘little city of the bishop’. In the 1200s, Siena and Arezzo fought the Battle of Pieve al Toppo outside the town and Civitella was largely destroyed (you’ll find the story of the battle recorded by Dante Alighieri). In 1289 the town fell to Florence, who lost it to Arezzo in 1311, with Florence retaking the city in 1348. All part of the deeply confusing weft and warp of life in medieval central Italy.
Civitella was on the receiving end of one of the Nazis many brutal acts of retaliation in 1944, when the Herman Goering Division killed 244 local people in reply to the murder of two German soldiers by partisans. The city received the Gold Medal for Civilian Valour in 1963. Important sights include the castle, from 1048, and used as an HQ by the Germans in the Second World War. Bombed by the Allies, it has never been rebuilt. There is the 14th century Palazzo Pretorio, and the Church of Santa Maria Assunta, begun in the eleventh century and finished in the Romanesque style in 1252, with additions in 1765 and 1865, and some rebuilding after the 1944 air raids.
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