Ponte a Cappiano

The population that concentrated around the Usciana river, the effluent of the stagnant waters that in those centuries had given rise to the Fucecchio marsh, was part of the parish of San Pietro di Cappiano, attested to beginning from the year 766. The Cappiano hills, overlooking the marsh, seem already to have been densely inhabited at the beginning of the 11th century, in the sense that the 1018 list of villages dependent on the parish of Cappiano shows the names of 31 towns. The breadth and population of this area is confirmed by the fact that a century later, following the extinction of the Cadolingi family—the counts of Fucecchio and owners of assets and rights in this area—the men of Cappiano present at the oath of 1119 numbered more than twice those of Fucecchio. Determining factors for the population development in those lands were, certainly, the almost unlimited food potential of the marsh’s fishing resources, and the presence of the pilgrimage route, the Via Francigena, which passed by here at least from the 10th century, as documented by the well-known “journey" of Sigerico, archbishop of Canterbury. According to this source, after passing the Arno (Arne Blanche), the road came close to the Cadolingi castle of Salamarzana (Fucecchio), passed the Aqua Nigra/Usciana and then went up to the Cerbaie, the hilly area by means of which the route overcame the wetlands of the Bientina-Fucecchio marsh lake system, to reach Lucca. The route had necessarily to pass the Ucsiana at Cappiano, where a bridge existed at least from the beginning of the 11th century. This is what we may reconstruct from the fact that the villa de Cappiano is referred to as de ultra ponte et de ista parte, because it must have developed on both banks of the Usciana, at the point of the bridge allowing the pilgrimage route to pass over the river to continue on the Cerbaie.

Toward the end of the 13th century, in a completely different scenario, the pilgrimage route, articulated near Fucecchio in the junctions of the bridges over the Arno and the Usciana, took on a completely new role. The road, in its connection there to the system constituted by the castle of Fucecchio and of the two obligatory crossings, became a strategic node of primary importance in the control of the border that, at the end of the 13th century, saw the cities of Lucca and Florence in opposition, the latter intending, then, to push the boundary of its territory beyond the Arno, toward the Valdinievole. It is within this context that we must read the interventions on the infrastructures of roads and bridges, and even on the fortified village of Fucecchio, which between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century constituted a genuine program for strengthening and protecting the border between the Arno and the marshes. The interventions were developed by Lucca, which, through the close relations it had with the Altopascio hospital, controlled that stretch of road that led up from the Arno, to the Cerbaie, and toward the city. The program included the fortification of Fucecchio, which was surrounded by a new circuit of walls, and the fortification of the two bridges. The old wooden bridge over the Arno dating from Frederick II's time was replaced in 1261 by a stone bridge with at least one tower in 1282. At the same time, the Cappiano bridge was fortified with a tower equipped with at least two drawbridges and had to be manned by a permanent garrison of 30 armed men. This essentially was the form in which Leonardo would depict it in the early 16th century, shortly before its radical transformation desired by Cosimo I.

After the plague that decimated the population in the middle of the 14th century and the perennial state of war in which this sector of the Valdarno found itself, Cappiano was a desolate place at the beginning of the 15th century. In 1397 the vicar of the Bishop of Lucca described it in these words: "loco solitudinis et vasti", a place devoid of souls, deserted, abandoned. The Cappiano bridge that Leonardo depicted in the famous bird's eye view map RL 12685 represented the image of the last form the structure reached by the end of the 13th century, when it was equipped with fortifications. Leonardo's drawing reproduces a turreted fortress on the shores of the Usciana. On the façade looking toward Fucecchio, from where the road to Lucca originates, we see an arch, the entrance to the covered passage that led to the other side of the waterway. The fortified bridge of Cappiano drawn by Leonardo is perfectly consistent with another depiction of the same structure that is found in an older map, around the middle of the 15th century. In this drawing, which precedes the Leonardian image by only a short time, the Cappiano bridge is seen from the west, composed of a covered passage dominated by a tower on the side looking toward Fucecchio. In the mid-16th century the Cappiano bridge was radically rebuilt on the initiative of Cosimo I de’ Medici, as the commemorative epigraph announces, beginning with these words: COSIMO MEDICI, DUKE OF FLORENCE / HAS REDONE THIS PLACE FROM ITS FOUNDATIONS [...]. As such the Cappiano bridge of Leonardo's depiction represents a precious snapshot of the ancient fortress bridge designed and built by Lucca at the end of the 13th century.