View of Castle Belfiore, Villamagna

From the 15th century onwards history manages to offer us a picture of the countryside just outside the city; it was open, highly cultivated and inhabited all the year round by families that lived in the open countryside, at a time while almost all the rest of the people in Europe still preferred to live within the protection of the fortified walls of cities or castles. Statistics on the population living in the Plain of Ripoli in this period fully confirm this way of life; although there were no large towns in the district when the first land register of the Florentine Republic was introduced in 1427, the parishes in the districts of Ripoli, Antella, Remoluzzo and Villamagna had as many as 3432 inhabitants, divided up into 655 family groups and fairly regularly distributed, even in the most isolated parishes.
This was partly due to the fact that, in the 14th-15th centuries, when their business interests were thriving, the upper and middleclass Florentine merchants invested some of their profits in land; this was not only to make a different kind of investment (and reduce their risks) but also to be able to supply Florence with plentiful and regular food supplies. When manufacture declined, merchants began quite simply to buy up more and more land in order to transfer their investments from commerce to agriculture instead.

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The inhabitants

The district