Long ere the Medici thought of building yet another princely villa on the Florentine hillside, or Cosimo I came to hunt in the woods above Signa, Artimino was a famous portion of the Arno valley and is continually mentioned in the oldest of the Tuscan chronicles. Its name may have come from the narrow defile (arctus minor) where the Arno forces its way through the barrier of hills at the Gonfolina and Artimino juts out into the valley like the prow of a ship, its foot bathed by the Ombrone and the Arno. It is really a spur of the great Mount Albano and so far back as the days of Cicero it had achieved a certain importance, for we find in his nineteenth epistle to Attico the mention that Silla had proclaimed Artimino, together with the territory of Volterra, public property in order to divide it amongst his soldiers. The hill of Artimino attracted not only the leaders of passing armies but numerous Roman families, who found the groves of ilex and oak upon its summit delightful sites for villas when they left the towns during the summer months. The valley of the Arno in those days may have suggested the same thoughts to a Roman poet as later to Ariosto, when he looked down from some Medicean terraced garden upon the “gay Arno,” and the palaces strewn so thickly over the hillsides. It is believed that the group of villas then standing on Artimino’s hill made quite a little community, and a certain record of life there has been preserved to us in a quantity of bronze idols, cinerary urns, necklaces and coins, mosaics and leaden tubes for conducting water of what may have been public baths found in the grottoes of the hillside. Scanty as is the history of the place in Roman times it begins to emerge in the tenth century, when Otto III, gave over Artimino and its church San Leonardo to the Pistojan bishop Antonino; and from this time we may date the building of its castle which was to serve as a protection to the frontiers of Pistoja against the ever encroaching raids of the Florentines. Now the Fattoria or agent’s house, a few peasants’ houses, part of a tower and an old wall, probably part of the ramparts whence the soldiers watched the valley far below for the approach of an enemy, are all that remain to recall the ancient village of Artimino. A stretch of country lane between the vineyards and an avenue of cypresses growing in a half circle behind the village now symbolise an age of securer peace, and between the straight, bare stems we see the little parish church of San Leonardo a little lower down on the hillside, with its loggia of rounded arches under which the peasants linger when they meet for mass on a Sunday morning. Its square campanile, so strongly built and tall, might easily have served as a watch-tower in the time of trouble. [Illustration: VILLA FERDINANDA A ARTIMINO.]