Discover Grosseto in Maremma
Administrative centre and chief town of Maremma, is now a real town (“Kansas City” was ironically called by the writer Luciano Bianciardi): it is elegant, clean, well organized, with its medieval centre enclosed by Medicean walls, and equipped with a thick net of business services and shops.
On Thursday is set an important and characteristic market. One can also visit the Archaeological Museum, which collects and exhibits a large documentation of local finds (from prehistory to Etruscan and Roman era, from barbarian times to the Renaissance), or theNatural History Museum, which presents documentation about the natural environment (geology, fauna and so on) and about the evolution of the territory and of the landscape.
Near Grosseto is Roselle, ancient Etruscan and Roman village, then bishop see and seat of count’s power of Aldobrandeschi. On e can still admire the city ruins, the old Roman street, the basement of houses, the circle-shaped amphitheatre.
Roselle was located on a hill looking directly to the Lake Prile, a wide inlet now turn into a plan cultivated with olive-groves. With time and with the detritus get by rivers, the lake Prile turn into a “padule” (marsh).
To reclaim this marsh the Tuscan Grand Dukes (particularly Peter Leopold I and Peter Leopold II) invested a lot of money and made several works, how testify the lonely Casa Rossa Ximenes, located in the middle of the Diaccia Botrona (which keeps the characteristics of a marsh), which was used as operative centre to direct the reclaim works.
The “padule” now is a protected area and shelter for the aquatic birds of passage as little egret, heron, stilt bird.
