Borgo Migliorini, un nido sull’Appennino
Migliorini is different from all the other villages in the Pistoia mountains.
Even just defining it as a town or a village would be a failure in recognizing its real nature. Migliorini is a niche where time and events seem to have different rules. Migliorini looks more like a nest where to stop and enjoy the well-deserved rest before flying again. Migliorini shares the events and the origins of the neighbouring towns only in part: its history is intertwined with those, but it always maintains its precise identity and it generates its own stories and tales that never seem to end.
In many books and novels, writers have enjoyed locking up people in a house or a tavern where they could find a moment of quiet and share their stories before leaving and going back to their lives. For the mountains, Migliorini has been and will always be this.
Born in 1500 as an inn that hosted travelers who crossed the Bridge Castruccio, and probably also smugglers, it has always offered safe refreshment, also thanks to the fortifications that probably protected it. Founded by the Migliorini family, whose coat of arms – two ears of millet – is still visible in the structure, it then passed into the expert hands of the female branch of the family. In particular, Anna Rosa Cartoli – who married Giovanni Cini, one of the most important industrialists in the mountain – gave new life to the villa, oversaw the restoration – the first of four which changed its appearance –, and began to welcome intellectuals and artists who wanted to live fully and be pervaded by the romantic vein that crossed Europe in that time. Among these, the most important were certainly Lucy Barnes Baxter, known mainly under her pseudonym, Leader Scott, and Violet Page, also known as Vernon Lee. The two women lived their stay intensely and formed a unique bond with this place and with those who lived there: enough to leave them two novels that have Migliorini as main character. Lucy Barnes Baxter wrote “A nook in the Appennines”, also called “A summer under the chestnut trees”, where she beautifully tells the life of the village by recalling its nature as a safe and sheltered place. Violet Page, instead, wrote “The House of the Louvers” a historical novel set in Migliorini and dedicated to the Cini family, as well as some of her other works.
The bond with England and English intellectuals was further strengthened when the famous English architect Herbert Percy Horne was commissioned to carry out the second restoration in which Migliorini recovered part of the sixteenth-century identity that had been lost in the first restoration. Instead, the third restoration was necessary to repair the damages of the Second World War, while the fourth occurred between the ‘80s and ‘90s and it saw the installation of the robbian panel by Cantagalli that celebrates the Annunciation.
The ownership of Borgo Migliorini and its villa passed to the Dazzi family who still keep it and enhances this small pearl of the Pistoia Apennines. Romano and Arturo Dazzi were great and important artists themselves and they used Migliorini as a laboratory to experiment and study: many of their works were born right within these walls and in the garden that surrounds them. Many works are still here, in the place where they belong.