47 Fun Facts About Tuscany

Visitors overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of Florence's art are said to suffer from which syndrome?

Stendhal syndrome: the French novelist left the church of Santa Croce in 1817 with his heart pounding, afraid he would fall, and a Florence hospital psychiatrist later named the condition after studying over a hundred dazed tourists.

Which ancient civilisation gave Tuscany its name?

The Etruscans: the Romans called them Tusci and absorbed their cities one by one, yet the losers' name outlasted Rome itself, passing through Tuscia to Toscana.

Which Italian red wine was traditionally sold in a round-bellied flask wrapped in straw?

Chianti: the straw was armour, because the thin glass of the round-bellied fiasco would otherwise break on the road to market; most makers have since switched to standard bottles.

What does the 'da Vinci' in Leonardo da Vinci's name refer to?

His home town: a notary's son born out of wedlock in or near Vinci, a small Tuscan hill town, he left as a boy to train in Florence under the sculptor Verrocchio and carried the town's name with him.

Which river flows through Tuscany's capital, Empoli and Pisa?

The Arno burst its banks in November 1966, flooding Florence, and volunteers from around the world, nicknamed the 'mud angels', hauled sodden books and manuscripts out of the mud.

Lorenzo de' Medici, who ran Florence at the height of the Renaissance, is remembered by which nickname?

The Magnificent: he nearly never earned it, for in 1478 the rival Pazzi family attacked him in Florence's cathedral; his brother Giuliano was killed, Lorenzo escaped wounded, and the plotters were hanged from the palace windows.

In 1786 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany became the first modern state to abolish what?

The death penalty: Grand Duke Leopold's penal code of 30 November 1786 abolished it and ordered the gallows torn down wherever they stood.

Leopold, the reforming Grand Duke of Tuscany, was the brother of which queen of France?

Marie Antoinette: both were children of Empress Maria Theresa, whose husband Francis of Lorraine had been handed Tuscany in 1737 as compensation for giving up his own duchy.

Which state, ruled by King Victor Emmanuel II, annexed Tuscany in March 1860 on the way to Italian unification?

Sardinia: the Tuscans chose it themselves, voting overwhelmingly for annexation in a plebiscite on 11 and 12 March 1860, and a year later the enlarged kingdom became the Kingdom of Italy.

Which Tuscan hill town did Pope Pius II rebuild as a Renaissance 'ideal city' and rename after himself?

Pienza: born there when it was the village of Corsignano, Pius II hired the architect Rossellino in 1459 to remake his birthplace, the first town where Renaissance planning ideas were put into practice.

Which Tuscan spa town joined the World Heritage list in 2021 as one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe?

Montecatini Terme: its springs were known for centuries, but the spa town took shape only in the late 1700s, when Grand Duke Leopold built the first public baths; it is the only Italian town among the eleven listed.

Which statue did Michelangelo carve from a marble block that other sculptors had started and left outdoors for years?

David: commissioned for a buttress high on Florence's cathedral, the finished giant was instead set up outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of government; the original now stands in the Accademia.

Which Florentine wrote the Divine Comedy, completed shortly before his death in 1321?

Dante Alighieri wrote it in exile: banished from Florence in 1302 under threat of death, he died in Ravenna, and his home city has asked in vain for his remains ever since, making do with an empty tomb.

Both yearly runnings of Siena's Palio, the bareback horse race around the Piazza del Campo, are held in honour of whom?

The Virgin Mary: the 2 July race honours the Madonna of Provenzano, an image long venerated in Siena, and the 16 August race the feast of the Assumption; before each one, every horse is taken to be blessed.

What happens if a horse in Siena's Palio throws its jockey and still crosses the finish line first?

It wins the race: the first horse over the line takes the prize, rider or not, and the Sienese call a riderless runner a 'cavallo scosso'; with jockeys riding bareback round sharp bends, falls are common.

At what point did the Leaning Tower of Pisa first begin to tilt?

During its construction: the soft ground gave way once the first few storeys were up in the 1170s, and the wars that then halted work for almost a century probably saved it, giving the soil time to settle.

Which island of the Tuscan Archipelago held Napoleon in his first exile, from 1814 to 1815?

Elba was handed to Napoleon as a tiny realm of his own, with the title of emperor and a guard of 400 men; within ten months he had slipped away, landed in France and marched back into Paris.

Which cruise ship capsized off the Tuscan coast in January 2012 after its captain steered close to an island?

Costa Concordia struck rocks off the island of Giglio while sailing close for a 'salute' to the shore; 32 people died, and the captain, who left the ship before hundreds of passengers, got 16 years in prison.

Which town's surrounding quarries make Tuscany famous for marble?

Carrara: Michelangelo spent about eight months of 1505 in its quarries, picking out for himself the blocks for Pope Julius II's tomb.

The Vespa scooter, built in the Tuscan town of Pontedera since 1946, is named after the Italian word for which insect?

Wasp: Piaggio built aircraft until the war wrecked its Pontedera works, then rebuilt its fortunes on a scooter; the name is put down to its narrow-waisted shape or to the buzz of its engine.

What did Guido of Arezzo, an 11th-century Tuscan monk, give to Western music?

The do-re-mi syllables: he took them from the opening syllable of each line of a hymn, 'ut' only later becoming 'do'; fellow monks so resisted his new teaching that he left his abbey and settled in Arezzo.

Which composer of verismo opera came from Lucca?

Giacomo Puccini was expected to become a church organist, as his family had led the music at Lucca's cathedral for generations; he saw Verdi's Aida in Pisa at seventeen and went off to Milan to write operas instead.

Which giant white cattle breed, named after a Tuscan valley, traditionally supplies the beef for Florentine steak?

Chianina cattle take their name from the Val di Chiana; the huge white animals were long bred as draught oxen and only later raised chiefly for beef, above all the thick grilled Florentine steak.

Tuscans call their traditional bread 'sciocco', a local word meaning it is made without what?

Salt: 'sciocco' means unsalted in Tuscany, though to other Italians it means silly; the plain loaf is the chosen partner for the region's salty hams, salami and pecorino.

What kind of farm animal is Tuscany's Cinta Senese, a white-belted breed left to forage for acorns in oak woods?

Pig: the Cinta Senese came close to dying out in the last century, yet a belted pig just like it already appears in Lorenzetti's 14th-century fresco of good government in Siena's town hall.

Which mountain range walls off Tuscany to the north and east?

The Apennines: in 1944 the retreating German army fortified this crest north of Florence as the Gothic Line, a chain of defences running from one coast of Italy to the other.

Which fashion house began in 1921 as a Florence leather-goods shop opened by a former London hotel bellboy?

Gucci: Guccio Gucci had worked as a bellboy at London's Savoy Hotel, where, the story goes, the guests' fine luggage caught his eye; back in Florence he opened a leather-goods and luggage shop of his own.

Which Florence-born navigator had his first name put on the New World by a German mapmaker in 1507?

Amerigo Vespucci argued that the lands across the Atlantic were a new continent rather than Asia, so Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map labelled them 'America', from the Latin form of Amerigo.

Which instrument did Bartolomeo Cristofori invent around 1700 while working for the Medici court in Florence?

The piano: Cristofori swapped the harpsichord's plucked strings for hammers, so a player could at last play soft or loud by touch, and the instrument took its name, pianoforte, from that.

Which Germanic people, who invaded Italy in the 560s, ruled early medieval Tuscany from their duchy at Lucca?

The Lombards made Lucca the seat of their duchy of Tuscia and left their name on Lombardy; Charlemagne conquered their kingdom in 774 and put Frankish counts in their dukes' place.

Which Tuscan port began as a village that Florence bought from Genoa in 1421 to gain a harbour of its own?

Livorno was a fortified village when Florence bought it; the Medici built its harbour and drew in settlers with tax breaks and asylum, among them Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal, and it grew into Tuscany's great port.

Which children's classic did the Florentine writer Carlo Lorenzini publish under a pen name borrowed from the Tuscan village of Collodi?

Pinocchio first ran as a magazine serial that Collodi ended with the puppet hanged; its success pushed him to pick the story up again and write the ending everyone knows.

Which daughter of Tuscany's ruling house married the future Henry II of France in 1533?

Catherine de' Medici, orphaned within weeks of her birth in Florence, was married at fourteen; after Henry died she governed France as regent, and three of her sons wore its crown.

Which Botticelli painting in the Uffizi shows a goddess blown ashore on a giant scallop shell?

The Birth of Venus shows an arrival, not a birth: the goddess has already risen from the sea and the winds blow her to land, a large female nude of a kind hardly seen in Western art since antiquity.

At Larderello in 1904, Tuscany became the first place in the world to generate electricity from what?

Underground steam: jets hissing from the ground at Larderello had been tapped since the 1820s for boric acid; in 1904 a generator run on that steam lit a handful of light bulbs, and a power station followed within a decade.

Which Pisa-born scientist spent his last years under house arrest near Florence for arguing that the Earth moves around the Sun?

Galileo Galilei was condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 and confined to a villa at Arcetri, in the hills above Florence; there he wrote his great book on motion, which had to be slipped out of Italy and printed in Holland.

Which Oscar-winning Italian film begins as a romantic comedy in 1930s Arezzo before its hero is deported with his young son?

Life Is Beautiful drew on Roberto Benigni's own father, a farmer from near Arezzo who came home from a German labour camp and told his children about it as comedy; Benigni won the best actor Oscar in the role.

Which Tuscan hill town is famous for its surviving medieval tower houses?

San Gimignano bristled with some seventy towers, raised by rival families each set on building higher than the next; about one in five still stands.

Which sea, along with the Ligurian, washes Tuscany's western coast?

The Tyrrhenian takes over from the Ligurian among the Tuscan islands and runs south to Sicily; Africa's plate is sliding under Europe's beneath it, which is why volcanoes such as Stromboli rise from its waters.

A Medici grand duke cleared the butchers off Florence's Ponte Vecchio and gave their shops to which trade, still there today?

Jewellers and goldsmiths replaced a meat market that tipped its waste straight into the river; the ruling family walked over the bridge by a private corridor above the shops, and the stench had to go.

Which English Romantic poet was cremated on the beach at Viareggio, on the Tuscan coast, after drowning at sea in 1822?

Percy Bysshe Shelley was sailing home along the coast when a July storm sank his small boat; his body washed ashore days later and was burned there on the sand. He was not yet thirty.

Prato, just north-west of Florence, has been one of Italy's great centres of which industry since the 13th century?

Wool textiles made Prato rich by the 1200s; its merchant Francesco Datini left his fortune to the town's poor, along with well over a hundred thousand business letters that survive to this day.

Which former Florentine diplomat wrote The Prince in 1513, months after the returning Medici had jailed and tortured him?

Niccolò Machiavelli had served the republic the Medici overthrew; he wrote the book in exile on his small country property, dedicated it to a Medici all the same, and never saw it in print: it came out five years after he died.

San Miniato, between Florence and Pisa, holds a national fair each November for which prized food?

White truffles grow buried among tree roots in the hills around the town, so hunters rely on trained dogs to sniff them out; the fair fills three weekends every November.

Which goldsmith turned architect built the vast dome of Florence's cathedral without the wooden framework such vaults normally needed?

Filippo Brunelleschi, who had earlier missed out on the commission for the Baptistery's bronze doors, laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern so that each ring locked in place as the dome rose, with no timber beneath it.

Which Tuscan-born tenor sang in bars to fund a law degree, then briefly practised as a lawyer before finding fame?

Andrea Bocelli, blind since a football accident at twelve, spent a year as a court-appointed lawyer before music won; each July he sings at Lajatico, where he was born, in an open-air theatre built for one show a year.

Which fiery friar had Florentines burn their luxuries in the 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities?

Girolamo Savonarola ran the city after the Medici fled, but within months of the bonfire the pope had excommunicated him, and the next year the crowd turned: he was hanged and burned in Florence's main square.