Monte Lieto

The Valdicastello valley, at the centre of Versilia, is distinguished by a great morphological variety: the stream Baccatoio flows through it and the Mount Lieto (1016 m a.s.l.) massif towers above it, while more gently sloping hills flank it right down to the stream's outlet in the plain. The considerable archaeological records give us a chance to follow its complex human events along a period of time going from Prehistory up to the early Middle Ages.
The presence of rich copper deposits has made the settlement of this area attractive since the age of metals, when Aeneolithic people buried their dead in the Buca della Gigia and in the Tana della Volpe. Settlement, which during the initial phases of the Final Bronze Age was concentrated at the top of Mount Lieto, in a position controlling the high pastures, tends, at an advanced stage of the Final Bronze Age, to descend towards the foot of the mountain onto a hillock, at the place now called La Costa. At the beginning of the Iron Age, documented by the closing of a metal warehouse at Colle delle Banche, it descended further towards the plain and the sea, attracted by the trade developing along the coast, as we can tell from the settlement to which the Baccatoio necropolis belonged. Material, which we can date between the Archaic Age and Late Antiquity, found near the church of S. Giovanni and S. Felicita, is proof of continuous human presence, up to the beginning of the early Middle Ages.
At the top of Mount Lieto, the presence of a Final Bronze Age settlement has been discovered, followed, much later, between the III^rd and II^nd century b.C., by a new settlement belonging to the Apuan Ligurians.
(text by FABIO FABIANI)