Politics

Born in Florence in 1794. Marquis Cosimo Pietro Gaetano Gregorio Melchiorre Ridolfi was born into a noble Florentine family and of the many activities that he carried out, certainly the one that made him most illustrious – first under the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and then in the Kingdom of Italy – is the one related to the research of agronomy, which he carried out in his farm of Meleto, near Castelfiorentino, in collaboration with his farmer Agostino Testaferrata, where he created the first school of agriculture in Italy.
In order to divulge his research, in 1827 he created the “Giornale Agrario della Toscana” together with Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and Raffaello Lambruschini, and in order to help savers in 1828 he inspired the creation of a cassa di risparmio (savings bank) which would favour investments in agriculture. This bank continued its operations under the name of Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.
From 1840 to 1845 he held the chair of agronomy at the University of Pisa and from 1842 to 1865 he was president of the Accademia dei Georgofili.
In the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was Minister of the Interior in 1847 and in 1848 he became President of the Council of Ministers. The following year he was elected to the presidency of the council of deputies. At the time of the fall of the dynasty of Lorraine, in 1859, was called to join the Provisional Government of Tuscany as Minister of Education, with the interim of foreign affairs, after the union of Tuscany to Piedmont, in 1860 he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom.

He was born in Castelfiorentino in 1706 and he has been defined the greatest Italian reformer of the half of the 18th century.
An economist, a politician, a professor of public law at the University of Pisa, he was the inspirer of one of the reforms most requested by the landowners. His most famous work was the “Trattato de la Nobiltà” ( Treaty of the Nobility) which constitutes one of the points of arrival of the political and historical Italian reflection in the middle of the 18th century. In 1745 he was charged with the compilation of a Code for the whole Tuscany. In 1766 he realized, as a member of the extraordinary council instituted by the Grand Duke to ascertain the real economic conditions of the country, the first general census of the population.

Born in Castelfiorentino in 1929.
A member of the DC parliament, councillor in Florence with Giorgio La Pira, he was one of the historic leaders of the Christian Democrat left of the time and for years a leading figure in Florentine politics. He was founder and director, among other things, of the magazine “Politica”.

Born in Castelfiorentino in 1958.
She was mayor of Castelfiorentino from 1999 to 2009 and then vice president of the Province of Florence from 2009 to 2014. In 2013 she was included in the lists of the PD in the quota of Matteo Renzi, resulting then elected to the Senate of the Republic. At the political elections of 2018 she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the Tuscany constituency.

Born in Castelfiorentino November 14, 1901 from a family of poor farmers. Having put behind him his initial intention of becoming a priest, he entered the Officina Meccanica Mazzoni at a very young age as an apprentice turner and during the First World War joined the PSI. After the war, he actively participated in the occupation of the factories and in January 1921 he joined the new Communist Party of Italy. Faced with the increasing fascist violence, he was forced to expatriate to France in 1923 where he remained for five years, a decisive period for his training. After that, in December 1928, Manetti arrives in Moscow to attend a course in French at the International Leninist School, and in the first half of the Thirties he becomes a member of the Central Committee of the PCI and later of the Political Bureau of the Party, in charge of the organization section. Continuing his clandestine activity in Italy, he is arrested in 1936 and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. He spends the following years in prison, first in Saluzzo and then in Pianosa. After the armistice, he was freed by the partisans and resumed his clandestine activity. Sheltered in a cabin with other partisans, he was attacked by a contingent of SS and later killed with a gunshot to the forehead on April 19, 1945. In his memory was made a bust in Piazza Antonio Gramsci, which was inaugurated in 1953 with the participation of Palmiro Togliatti.

Born in Castelfiorentino. Belonging to one of the wealthiest families in Castelfiorentino, he was the first Mayor after the Unification of Italy and until his death in 1887 he held some of the most important public offices. He was the director of the local philharmonic, town councillor, treasurer of the Opera di Santa Verdiana, President of the Compagnia filodrammatica, of the Accademia degli Operosi Impazienti and of the Società Operaia. A lover of culture and art, throughout his life he collected valuable books which he donated in his testament to the Municipality of Castelfiorentino on the condition that within two years they would be placed in suitable rooms, open to the public, looked after by qualified personnel and enriched by an annual allocation with which to acquire new works. The Municipality was able to keep faith with Vallesi’s legacy and exactly two years after his death, in 1887, inaugurated the Library with a speech by Orazio Bacci and in his honor in the reading room there is a portrait of him painted by Annibale Gatti.

He was born in Castelfiorentino in 1895 and when he was very young he became a worker at Officina Meccanica Mazzoni, where he met Cesare Manetti. In 1913 he became secretary of the Young Socialists and later secretary of the local workers’ union. In the first post-war period he was among the main protagonists of several union battles, as well as the victory of the maximalist socialists in the administrative elections of 1920. Together with the Mayor Rosa, he is also the architect of the split at the Congress of Livorno in January 1921 that determines the birth of the PC of Italy. Persecuted by the fascists, he was forced to flee to Rome where he was later arrested and sentenced to 5 years of confinement, which will serve in Ustica, where he will have the opportunity to meet Antonio Gramsci. Struck by several family tragedies (the death of his first daughter in 1937, and of his wife and second daughter in 1944) he returned to Castelfiorentino after the Liberation and was elected Mayor in the spring of 1946, a position he held until 1951. He died in 1984.