Tra il monte Amiata e la Valle del Paglia. La natura polisemica di un paesaggio marginale

The context of the Paglia valley has been, on and off, relegated to an improper condition of marginality. In this contribution we summarise the results of previous research projects carried out in Abbadia San Salvatore and Radicofani. The centrality of the mountain during the Bronze Age, attested by conspicuous archaeological sites, was followed by a period of long silence, partly effective and partly explainable by the difficulty in finding, reading and interpreting certain particular types of sources. In reality, both the mountain and the valley occupied a central visual and semantic role in the perception of ancient communities and their ideational landscape. The valley bottom road, a non-secondary diverticulum of the Via Cassia, played a central role in the vertical mobility and exchanges in the Roman period, especially from the imperial age onwards and well before the history of the Via Francigena/Romea began. Villages and rural agglomerations on the valley bottom, integrated in a coherent network that forms the true ecological-historical interface between this border area and the Tiber valley, are the key to interpret the history of the context, a history of long duration but marked by sometimes sudden and deep transformations.