During the whole period of the Middle Ages the steep incline of the prominence south of Fiesole prevented many from building their lordly residences or (in the words of the period) ‘case da signore’ in the area above Maiano and San Domenico. Only with the Medici, who in the 1450s entrusted to the architect Michelozzo the bold construction of the Villa Medici, did beautiful country houses begin to spring up in the zone of Fiesole.
To be sure, the terraced olive groves covering the hills of Fiesole are the work of centuries, and were especially cultivated during the Grand-Duchy of Florence (1555 to the late eighteenth century).
In the nineteenth century many illustrious foreigners, in large part English, chose to reside in these hills. They acquired and restored early villas, or else built new ones in Gothic Revival, Renaissance, or bizarre ecelctic forms. Their Romantic sensibilities and the desire for complete seclusion moved these residents to surround their villas with ample parks, rows of cypresses, evergreen woods, and even to divert the course of roads.
With the Romantic Age the cypress came to dominate the landscape, and indeed the view becomes a means by which the physical limits of the garden per se are transcended. The suggestiveness of the landscape and the fascination of the medieval strongly guided the choice of residence on the part of foreign admirers and collectors and the changes they imposed.
The hills of Fiesole have never ceased to inspire poets, writers, and landscapists: from the Nyph of Fiesole of Boccaccio to the sonnets dedicated in the last century by Giuseppe Pieri ‘To the Summits of Fiesole,’ ‘To the Hill of Maiano,’ ‘To the Castle of Vincigliata.’ The name of Queen Victoria of England, a frequent visitor to Florence, is in dissolubly linked with many Fiesolan localities dear to her since childhood. Received by her happy and illustrious English guests she did not fail to greet the British community that would assmble for the occasion in the piazza of Fiesole.
Fiesole (300 m. above sea level in the main square, Piazza Mino) is situated some 9 km. from the center of Florence. It is the center of a town district of 15,000 residents of whom approximately a third live in the ancient town, another third in the 'Valle del Mugnone' zone and the remainder in the suburbs, housing clusters and isolated homes of the 'Valle dell'Arno' area. The territory spans about 42 square km., almost entirely hillscape with heights from 58 m. on the banks of the Arno to the 702 m. of Poggio Pratone, a true roof over Florence whose terrain must be described as pre-Appenine The urban centre is connected with the Mugello, a zone of broad, by means of a hillback road that passes through the Olmo. A thick web of ancient roads ensures crosswise communication in other directions. The landscape, primarily farm and forest, is punctuated by olives, the most widely cultivated tree, by patches of conifer woods and copses, and by houses integrated with nature with a wisdom born of long experience. In 1983 the Town Council made provision for the order and conservation of the countryside through measures governing the restoration of farmhouses, thereby saving the cultural and ecological values of this precious inheritance of centuries of Tuscan agrarian culture. Industry is limited to small firms of craftsmen, and instead service and commercial activities prevail to the extent that one speaks of Fiesole as a zone characterised by residence and tourism.
History. The hills of Fiesole, which from afar present the shape of a crescent moon (the hill of S. Francesco to the west, the hill of S. Apollinare to the east), an image included in the city’s crest, have been inhabited at least since the Bronze age (circa 2000 B.C.). There are traces down through the successive Iron Age during which Etruscan civilisation reached its height (circa VIIIth - IVth centuries B.C.). The Etruscans, who employed a language diverse from the Italic and Latin populations in the peninsula, were strongly integrated with Greek culture, organised their territory into city-states, and developed a rich and complex economy. The urban centre of Fiesole developed around the areas of the earliest dwellings, on the heights. The city proper, marked by an imposing defensive wall running more than 2,500 m. around the two hills, dates to the Hellenistic period (late IVth - early IIIrd centuries B.C.). Understandably, given Fiesole’s position in central Italy, the town became a strategic point for the control of traffic over the major arteries between the south-central areas of Etruria (covering large parts of present-day Tuscany, Umbria and Latium) and the Etruscans of the Po valley zone, and a bulwark against invasions by No0rthern peoples, above all the Gauls. As is often the case, the Latin authors offer far less historical information than archeological researches do. Fiesole was allied with Rome against Hannibal in 217 B.C. In 90 B.C. Portius Cato destroyed the town, which had taken an anti-Roman stance during a civil war in the capital.
Ten years later the veterans of Silla colonized Fiesole, displacing local farmers. In due course Fiesole became the centre of the revolt of Catiline against the Roman republic and suffered the consequences of his defeat. In the second half of the Ist century B.C. Fiesole was transformed into a typical Roman city. The new buildings include a theatre seating 3,000, a new temple replacing the Etruscan one, and a bath complex (most of the large-scale archeological ruins date to this epoch). During the last phase of the Roman empire two battles were fought in Fiesolan terriotry, that between Stilico and Radagaisius (405 A.D., during the invasion of the Goths) and that between Belisarius and the Ostrogoth Vitige (539). After the fall of the empire Fiesole was occupied by the Lombards (VI-VII sec. d. C.) as attested by the recovery of many tombs and objects. With time Florence took over Fiesole’s role as a stronghold.
As was commonly the case, the Roman administrative district formed the basis for the organisation of the Church and its very extensive diocese, which still today embraces the important historical regions of the Casentino and the Chianti. The early bishops were an important factor in regional politics, and indeed their rule extended to civil matters. The Cathedral was founded in the XIth century by Jacopo the Bavarian. In the XIIth century Florence organised itself as a free town or commune, and conquered and destroyed Fiesole, whose bishop was required to reside in Florence. Thenceforth the ruined town entered a phase of relative decline, reduced to supplying Florence with materials and skills. Fiesole also entered the patrimony of remembrances and legends about the origins of Florence, to which Dante Alighieri alludes in the Divine Comedy, and which he and other Florentines naturally shaped to their own purposes.
Boccaccio, Politian, Lorenzo the Magnificent
Giovanni Boccaccio’s works leave no doubt that he felt the slopes of Fiesole to be a delightful place and the ideal setting for his narratives and his imaginative mythology. Since Renaissance times this countryside, celebrated by Politian and visited assiduously by Lorenzo the Magnificent and the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, has been chosen as the haunt or country seat of well-to-do Florentine (and later foreign) families, and their splendid homes and villas remain as evidence. In the XIVth century, however, many of the inhabitants of Fiesole earned their livelihood as quarrymen or stonecutters processing pietra serena, the renowned grey stone used already by the Etruscans and Romans for architecture and ornament, and still abundantly present to the eye in Fiesole and Florence. Much later, from the second half of the XIXth century, concurrent with Florence’s brief r^ le as capital of Italy (1865-70), Fiesole became the scene of much new building and urban expansion, marked by new exclusive homes and also housing for the poor and middle-class.
Essentially the present-day aspect of Fiesole was consolidated at this time. In 1873 the remains of the Roman theatre were excavated under the direction of marquess Carlo Strozzi, , and in 1878 the archeological zone and civic museum were established. The museum’s present residence was built in 1914 and restored, enlarged and rearranged in 1981-1990. Thanks to the enlargement of the city of Florence, decided in 1865 by the new-born Italian state, in 1910 the town council of Fiesole lost jurisdiction over some important areas. Nonetheless, the early history and later identity of Rovezzano, Settignano, Pellegrino, Coverciano and Mensola are distinctive and inseparabale from that of Fiesole, whether one considers the finer dwellings of different periods, the functional and tastefully designed gardens and cultivated areas, or the road- and water-works.
The English at Fiesole. The presence of foreigners and especially the English inserts itself within the matrix of nineteenth-century cultural renewals and rediscoveries. Here the most prominent case is John Temple Leader’s reconstruction of the Castle of Vincigliata, which is accompanied by a revival of the Middle Ages (as the period was understood at the time) in general and in particular in architecture and the ‘minor arts’, and even extends to restoration and landscape design (the lakem of the columns in thge Maiano estate, the cypress and ilex woods), implanting a taste that waned only early in the present century. Beyond its undeniable richness in archeological and art historical artefacts, Fiesole fascinates us today in large part becaiuse of its splendid panoramas, with the landscape accessible close to the fortified walls of the town.
From the Middle Ages until the period of the unification of Italy in the second half of the last century, the old network of roads and the system of churches formed the basis of civic, government and ecclesiastic life in the area. The agrarian landscape was reorganised and reshaped by the Florentine merchant class, with farm units run on the sharecropping system (with the farmhouse as the centre), and ekliminating or altering many of the earlier castles and villages (so that few traces remain of earlier modes of farming). The cypress, traditionally thought to have been brought in by the Etruscans, really became diffused in this zone in the late nineteenth century as a decorative element of lordly dwellings. In the Renaissance period a wealthy and refined class of patrons enriched and cultivated the dwellings and the churches of the area, propagating villas and gardens, not to mention works of painting sculpture and skilled crafts, many of which remain in their original locations. The rule of the Medici was fundamental in the redefinition of the territory in terms that served the interests of Florence but that was marked by beauty as a principle governing all the arts. The care that was taken is perceptible in any direction one turns, in small places as well as the most imposing, main roads or little ones.
In 1870, 177 historic villas and 564 fine dwelling and farmhouses were catalogued in the territory. Much of the road network is centuries old: the links between farms and isolated houses, the springs, terrace walls, channels for irrigation or for mills. Some place-names go back to the Etruscans, others to the Romans, and still others refer to the medieval period or to activities that have disappeared. The crossroads are still marked by tabernacles, signs of devotiuon and at the same time of a social, cultural and spatial order consolidated over the centuries. An excursion to the quarries helps to gain an idea of the scale of the stoneworking activity based here. Without this activity, Renaissance architecture, so intimately bound up with decorative elements, could not have developed, and Florence and other areas in Italy would have been much poorer in art objects and in more practical building elements (paving, stairs, portals, brackets, fountains, chimney-pieces, benches, basins, sheathing, tablets). A visit to the civic museum of Fiesole and the adjacent archeological zone is essential for a clear sense of the early history of Fiesole.
During the whole period of the Middle Ages the steep incline of the prominence south of Fiesole prevented many from building their lordly residences or (in the words of the period) ‘case da signore’ in the area above Maiano and San Domenico. Only with the Medici, who in the 1450s entrusted to the architect Michelozzo the bold construction of the Villa Medici, did beautiful country houses begin to spring up in the zone of Fiesole. 
