Fool's Gold: the Old Mining Town of Gavorrano

In the municipality of Gavorrano, and indeed very close to the town itself, stand the ruins of Castel di Pietra. The castle has been all but completely razed to the ground, but one of its surviving walls bears a plaque with lines from Dante’s Purgatorio: “Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia: / Siena mi fè, disfecemi Maremma” (Remember me, who am Pia: Siena made me, Maremma unmade me). The speaker is Pia de’ Tolomei, a Sienese noblewoman who made an ill-starred marriage to a local grandee, Nello dei Pannocchieschi, the lord of this very castle. Pia was killed by her husband, who is thought to have pushed her from one of the castle windows, and Gavorrano remembers her murder every August with an event known as the “salto della contessa” (leap ofe the countess). The townspeople don medieval costume and form two processions, one for the Tolomei and one for the Pannocchieschi: the evening concludes with a woman falling from a window, enacting the fate of La Pia.

Gavorrano’s economy was traditionally based on the mining of pyrite, often known as ‘fool’s gold’ on account of its brassy lustre: indeed it was the largest source of pyrite in Europe at one point. Its mines closed in 1981, but were converted into a multimedia Mining Museum, which form a constituent part of the National Technological and Archaeological Park of the Colline Metallifere Grossetane. Visitors can descend into the tunnels, which were used to store the explosives that were deployed to extend them even further, and can see the Pozzo Roma, an iconic tower which marks the spot where the pyrite was brought to the surface. One particular mining pit has been transformed into an open-air theatre, the Teatro della Rocce, which puts on a variety of shows and spectacles every summer.

Gavorrano's parish church has been dedicated to the town's patron saint since 1529. The site had been home to a sanctuary far back in the mists of the early medieval period, and Rationes Decimarum - a record book of tithes - named the church here as a parish seat as early as the late-thirteenth, early-fourteenth centuries. The current building is neoclassical in style, having undergone substantial remodelling in the 1700s, but the artworks inside date back much further. These include the seventeenth-century painting that is the Madonna del Buonconsiglio, and a marble Madonna with Child by Giovanni d'Agostino, a Sienese sculptor who lived and worked in the mid-1300s.