"Through mid-Tuscany winds a stream that rises in Falterona and a hundred miles of course do not suffice for it" wrote Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy. Let's follow this river with its varying flows from drought to floods which earned it the epithet of "ruinous nasty torrent" as G. Targioni Tozzetti, the 18th century naturalist, described it.
The springs of the river Arno
On average, the Arno breaks its banks once every hundred years flooding the plain around the city of Florence. The last great flood was in 1966 when the water in the city centre was more than 4 metres deep.
But before the Arno becomes a "nasty torrent" under the bridges of Pisa and Florence, its springs tell the story of a river which was a place of worship for the Etruscans who considered the pools at its source the perfect place for leaving offerings. A confirmation of this comes from the chance discovery, in the early 18th century, of a small bronze image of Heracles who was worshipped by the Etruscans as a divinity.
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| "Armed youth from Falterona" (12cm high, ca. 400-370 BC, Louvre Museum, Paris) is one of the statuettes found in the Arno's springs |
A part of this immense archaeological heritage can be seen at the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris but countless pieces also belong to private collections: this division is to be blamed on the Grand-ducal Galleries under the guidance of Leopold II who did not feel the finds merited purchase.
(For the history of the finds see, A.M. Fortuna, F. Giovannoni: Il lago degli Idoli, testimonianze etrusche in Falterona, 1975. For further study see, M. Cristofani: I bronzi degli Etruschi, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1985).
