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The foundation of the landscape: castles and tower houses
A series of fortified buildings were constructed to defend and protect the main roads of communication between the vale of Florence and the Upper Arno Valley in the territory of Ripoli from the 12th century onwards: Castel Belforte, which stood near Villamagna, was certainly the most important.

Castle Belforte with the Castle of Monte Acuto in the distance

Castles also were built on Monte Masso, at Montisoni (on the site of the present church), at Montepilli (where a chapel and other buildings stand today) and at Remoluzzo. Towards the end of the 13th century, the increase in the population and food consumption encouraged the great Florentine families to start investing their money in land which they bought up in the immediate outskirts of the city, setting up farmholdings and building country houses. A great many important architectural reminders of this "colonization of the countryside" can still be found throughout the district in the form of "gentleman's residences"; the oldest of these are the "tower houses", which the owner used as his country residence, for storing farm produce, and, when necessary, as a military fortress. These defensive requirements were of course why most of these buildings were designed vertically, with a limited number of small windows, battlements on top and powerful outer stone walls. Traces of these old tower houses can still be seen for example at Rignalla, dating from the early 13th century, Terzano and in the Terigi family house.

Villa Monna Giovannella, the well in the courtyard

Although the older buildings were usually built on a vertical design, from the early 14th century we can find a progressive tendency to extend them on a more horizontal plan

A typical example is square-built Palagio di Quarate, strengthened on one side by a tower, which stands near the surviving tower of the Castle of Quarate; another is Corti a Ruballa, the ancient country residence of the Peruzzi family, together with Villino and Villa Pedriali. The castles, perched high up on the ridges of the hills, and the gentleman's residences, on the lower hillocks, indicate the lines of the territorial development that, in the late Middle Ages, can be seen as the progressive descent of the settlements on the highest hilltops to the lower levels of the valley. This also had a profound effect on farming and therefore the landscape: the small cultivated fields, cleared from the forests by peasants in mediaeval times, gradually gave way to hill farms, which concentrated on the first widespread cultivation of olive groves and vineyards, intermingled with cereals.These "gentleman's residences" were to undergo drastic changes in the 15th century when the palaces in the city and the ancient castles began to lose their turretted and fortified structures and gradually took on a more "civil" aspect, the symbol of the dignity, power or political role of the family that owned them. The great Renaissance palaces were built in the city while the country villas opened onto the outer world with the creation of formal gardens.


Farm holdings and landed property from medaeval times to today

Hill farms along Via di Pulicciano

The changes to the "gentleman's residences" soon influenced the structure of landed property and the cultivated landscape. The transformation of the tower houses into villas led to a heavy reduction in the number of proprietors, so that a great many "gentlemen's residences" were degraded to "farm labourers' houses" (farmhouses).

The fortified Villa delle Corti a Ruballa, previously the property of the Peruzzi family

A typical example of this eclipse is the tower house of Centanni. While the ancient tower-houses were being converted into villas or reduced to simple farmhouses, many important changes were taking place in the local agricultural structure. Although the first "poderi or farmholdings" were set up during the 15th century, farms as we know them today were actually created much more recently, and these formation processes took them both a long time.

An example of this is the farm of Mondeggi, whose formation as such began between 1531 and 1538, when the Counts Della Gherardesca purchased some land, a "gentleman's residence" and a farmhouse; the farm was gradually enlarged, reaching its maximum acreage in 1807 when, after the addition of several other farm holdings, the huge estate was finally concentrated around the villa.

It was not until the second half of the 18th century that farms began to have an economic as well as an agricultural importance: the proprietors stopped just investing in land or in the construction of villas and started creating real agricultural farm estates that were run in a business-like manner and supplied with suitable farm equipment and machinery. At the beginning of the 20th century there were about 200 villas belonging to rich Florentine families in the territory of Bagno a Ripoli, almost all of them created around ancient mediaeval buildings during the 16th to the 17th century; in some cases it is still possible to see the tower around which the villa was built.