Castelnuovo di Val di Cecina

Castelnuovo di Val di Cecina sits on a high spur above the Cecina river, in the geothermal heart of Tuscany. The hills around it are scored with soffioni, the same steam that Francesco Larderel learned to harness in 1818 a few kilometers down the road: the natural resource that made this stretch of Tuscany industrial rather than merely agricultural. The frazione with the steam vents in its streets sits apart from the main village, which grew instead around copper.

The two economies, mineral steam and mined ore, shaped separate parts of the comune rather than the same hill, and the fortress on the neighboring ridge stood to survey the valley that connected them. The chestnut, gathered on the slopes above both, was the food that got people through the winter regardless of what came out of the ground. What this comune amounts to, then, is a single valley organized around three different things the earth gave it: heat, copper, and chestnuts, each claimed by a different part of the terrain.