New Prospects from Renaissance Tuscany

This summer, Italy's deputy prime minister – and some say, Italy's Tony Blair – officially opened the Parco Archeologico Minerario di San Silvestro. The park is situated in western Tuscany on the flank of the hills overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and the island of Elba.

At Rocca San Silvestro Professor Riccardo Francovich of the University of Siena, has been carrying out large-scale excavations for a dozen years. The centrepiece of the park is the deserted village of Rocca, which nestles around a rocky outcrop.

The medieval village was founded in the tenth century, in common with many hilltop settlements in central Italy. Its zenith occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when, under Pisan patronage, it accommodated families who specialised in the extraction and working of copper, lead and silver.

The minerals were found in the veins around the village which were exploited in deep shafts. Around the end of the thirteenth century the Pisans discovered cheaper ways of obtaining these precious metals from the island of Sardinia. As a result the village economy failed, and Rocca was abandoned.