The colours of the rioni

• … and they used to rinse clothes in the Ombrone
• After September 8th 1943
• Between the twenties and thirties
• Corrado Capecchi, military internee
  • A medal (at last) for Corrado
  • The joke of the military internees
• Five places of Romanesque Carmignano
• Friar Bocci, at the beginning of the twentieth century
• From archaeologists to farmers
• Gino Balena
• Gino di Fico
• Historical shops in Carmignano
• In the name of Jesus and Saint Peter, may the sty go away
• Liberation day
• Matteucci, the ‘forgotten’ bishop
• Soldier in Greece
• Stories from a school notebook
• Stories of donkeys and jockeys
• Stories of mayors and town councils in Carmignano
• Stories of our home
• Stories of war and displaced persons
• The Battistina and other scary stories
• The colours of the rioni
• The Golden Roster
• The last sharecropper in Carmignano
• The siege in memory of the Princess
• The tree of liberty in Carmignano
• Ugo Contini Bonacossi
• Vittorio’s bicycles
• When the river Arno was fordable ..
• When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone
• The colours of Carmignano, a small guide for tourists
  • Ancient churches and abbeys. Montalbano, a crossroads for pilgrims.
    • San Giusto al Pinone
    • San Jacopo in Capezzana
    • San Leonardo in Artimino
    • San Lorenzo in Montalbiolo
    • San Martino in Campo
    • San Michele amarcord
      • San Michele, the theater takes to the streets
• Itineraries for just a few days or more
  • Walking through history and nature
  • A Sunday devoted to the discovery of Artimino
  • A few words about the hamlets of Carmignano
  • The Fontina and Castagnati Lake
• Guides to download

Four parades for as many rioni (districts), where the colours yellow, green, blue and white seem to be random whereas basically they are not. To tell that was, a few years ago, Mauro Bindi, “historian” of the feast of San  Michele and guardian of many anecdotes. At the beginning, in 1932 an attempt was made ​​to involve all the suburbs in the municipality. Then in 1934 the rioni, more or less as we know them today, were created.   “They concerned Carmignano and the nearby suburbs Bindi explains   Montalbiolo, La Vergine, La Serra, Santa Cristina a Mezzana, Verghereto.”In the nineties a piece of Seano joined in.
“The colours, Bindi goes on to say, were intended to be representative of the locality to which they were attributed. “The reason why the yellow rione had a yellow lion in the coat of arms is easy to guess: the district is home to the town hall and the lion is the same as the Municipality. The colour yellow as gold, he recounts, instead was meant to suggest the wealth of its inhabitants. At that time, in effect, the wealthiest people used to live in the old village centre as well as the merchants. The same mechanism led to choose green for the rione of art, the one that included the lower part of the village, away from the current Via Bicchi to Via Fratelli Buricchi, Via dell’Arte, Via Mazzei and Via del Ceppo.

“Green”, Mauro continues, is the colour of poverty and hope and in effect in the contrada lived the least wealthy part of the population. “It’s easier to understand the reason for light blue in the case of the contrada dell’Arcangelo: the church of San Michele is in fact part of the rione and for the contrada, which now includes La Serra, Montalbaiolo, Il Bagno, I Renacci, Via Modesti and up to the early Sixties, also Via Chiti, the colours of the saint were chosen .”The white of the Contrada della Torre”, concludes Mauro “evokes peace: the part of the village that goes from the Rocca to Santa Cristina in Mezzana was in effect the most rural and serene. Or maybe white was chosen simply because the bell tower that still dominates the village was white. ” Red was chosen for no rione, of course, because “politically inconvenient” in that period. (w.f.)