Introduction to Pistoia

17km (11 miles) NW of Prato; 35km (22 miles) NW of Florence; 336km (209 miles) N of Rome

An ancient Roman town (Catiline and his conspirators were defeated here in 62 B.C.) built against the foothills of the Apennines, Pistoia is another city whose proximity to Florence causes many travelers to pass it by on their way to Lucca or Pisa. Its pretty churches, small but worthy art collections, and well-preserved dark medieval alleyways make it a worthwhile stop -- and hint at its unusual historic situation. Halfway between rivals Pisa and Florence, it inherited beautiful Romanesque churches and Gothic sculpture through the influence of the former and the best of the Renaissance from its proximity to the latter.

However, the machinations of these eternally feuding Tuscan rivals, with some 14th-century meddling by Lucca thrown in, also left their mark on Pistoia's medieval character. After the city's Ghibelline comune was conquered by Guelph Florence in 1254, the Pistoiese were reportedly the ones who began the schism between Black and White Guelphs. One day, a Pistoiese child of the ancient Neri (Black) family was playing at wooden swords with a friend from the Bianchi (White) household and one -- the legend doesn't say which -- was injured. When the perpetrator was sent by his father to apologize to the other boy, the hurt child's father responded by hacking off the offending youth's hand, declaring, "Iron, not words, is the remedy for sword wounds." The ensuing conflict spread to Florence as noble households waged secret wars and occasional all-out street battles against one another. This political plague was so devastating and devious that Michelangelo later stigmatized the Pistoiese as the "enemies of Heaven."

Pistoiese already had a nasty reputation. Political arguments in Pistoia were historically decided by secret assassinations, performed with the aid of the daggers, called pistolese, produced by the city's famous metalworking industry. As times advanced and science allowed men to kill one another in increasingly effective ways, the city began producing hand-held firearms that adopted the dagger's old name: pistol.

Modern-day Pistoia, aside from its art treasures, has little to do with its notorious past. Today, the metal industry's chief products are the train cars and buses made by the Breda works, which outfitted the Washington, D.C., Metro. The town's biggest modern industry is horticulture, and Pistoia's peripheral "industrial zone" is a Dr. Seuss miniature landscape of ornamental trees and shrubbery lined up in orderly rows.