A Brief History of Our Border Area Between Umbria and Tuscany
The east-west road through the Niccone Valley, framed on its north and south edges by high hills, was among the crucial passages between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Sea for centuries of tribes and empires going back before the Etruscans settled the lands of what was to become Umbria and Tuscany.
Traveling this road coming from the east, one passes through Umbria, then Tuscany, then back to Umbria before scaling the hills at the western end of the Valley, through which the road continues to straddle the border of Umbria and Tuscany. Today, the dense history and military importance of this east-west passage is still visible from the many imposing castle fortresses that loom on the heights above and on both sides of the road.
In the immediate area of the Altabella villas, four imposing fortresses and the ancient fortress town of Preggio loom on the surrounding hills. These include the Ranieri di Sorbello Castle at the center of the Niccone Valley, the Reschio Castle on a neighboring hillside, the Lisciano Niccone Castle a bit to the south and west, and the ruins of the Pierle Castle at the far western end of the Valley road. This latter noble structure once stood guard at the entrance to the mountain pass that leads to Lake Trasimeno (in Umbria), made famous by Carthage’s defeat of the Romans in the Second Punic War, and to the ancient city of Cortona (in Tuscany), whose founding dates to the time of the Etruscan League, between the 8th and 7th centuries BC.
This landscape of castles--each with its own roiling history, and each embedded in a spectacular natural landscape, undisturbed by modern structures--was the compelling force that first drew us to purchase three ruined stone houses intimately linked to these stunning surroundings. It is reasonable to assume that Altabella’s La Pietra Villa may have begun its life as a Roman signal tower, because of its commanding position looking west southwest toward the fortress town of Preggio and the Reschio Castle. One can see in the ancient stonework of La Pietra the delineation of a front tower-like portion, later extended backwards into the glacial rock face that protects the structure on its northeastern flank.
This extension may reflect a moment when the building’s military uses were slowly converted for residential purposes by the generations of peasants (contadini) who worked the lands of the Ranieri di Sorbello castle from the 10th century until the post-World War II period. Through those many centuries, these sharecroppers provided martial support to the castle to which they owed fealty as well as cultivated the outlying lands of the castle’s far-reaching territories. The agricultural component of these hierarchical arrangements was conducted under a feudal, non-cash-based system known as mezzadria in which the peasants owed half of all they cultivated to the castle.
The nobility that exacted this tribute were officially installed as overlords of the land sometime following Charlemagne’s successful conquest of areas of northern Italy during the early 770’s AD. Following this conquest, the mighty Frankish king established alliances with various powerful families and the popes of Rome up until and following his crowning as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD.
The Ranieri di Sorbello Castle, which, to this day, is still the private home of members of the family that built the castle in the 10th century, was a military fortification and economic unit serving the interests of the reigning post-Charlemagne generations, through the Medici, to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany and beyond. The castle is the jutting nose that breaks into Umbria in the middle of the Valley as a projection of Tuscan power that geographically declares the Ranieri di Sorbello’s fealty to the Medici during their wars with the Papal States, of which Umbria was a part in those centuries.
The branch of the Ranieri di Sorbello family based in the Niccone Valley were members of a vast clan of noble families known collectively as the Marchesi del Monte (the Marquises of the Mountain), with a network of castles sprinkled to the north, south, east and west of the Niccone Valley, with international connections through blood and marriage with many of the most well-known aristocratic families in Europe and America.
During the 2nd World War, the Germans briefly occupied the Ranieri di Sorbello castle as part of their more extended occupation of the town (commune) of Umbertide and its surrounding territories. Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello, also known as Count Uguccione Ranieri Bourbon del Monte, worked with the Allied forces during the prolonged liberation of Italy from the Germans, running several dangerous underground missions in Italy and in Germany.
In his role as an elegant guerilla intelligence operative, Uguccione was part of extensive partisan activities emanating from occupied Umbertide and throughout the Niccone Valley and its surrounds. Indeed, many partisan fighters hid themselves in the hills surrounding the Altabella Villas, finding ways of escaping German patrols in the rugged, beloved terrain. A monument to partisans gunned down by the Germans in our area can be see just west of the little hamlet of Niccone, at the eastern end of the Valley.
A professor of Italian literature and a journalist, Uguccione was the son of an American mother and an Italian father of the ancient ancestry of the Ranieri, Sorbellos, Petrellas, and Bourbons. Uguccione’s son, Ruggero Ranieri, is currently the President of the Fondazione Ranieri di Sorbello, located in the family’s 16th century Palazzo in Piazza Piccinino in the center of Perugia. Ruggiero opened this grand house, where he also lives, as one of the first museums of a privately owned noble residence in Italy.
Located on their high hillside above and at the heart of the Niccone Valley, La Pietra, La Quercia and Casa Carina have their own ancient place within this long and intriguing history.