Buonconvento History

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Buonconvento originated in the late twelfth century as a trading post on the pilgrimage route to Rome, the Via Francigena. Its first historical mention was by French King Phillip Augustus, who sojourned there in 1191. Its name implies that it is a safe gathering place, a spot for weary travelers to rest and trade.

Its strategic position means that it was witness to a good amount of history in the past eight hundred years. Most famously, Buonconvento was host to the death of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII on August 24, 1313, which effectively ended Dante’s hopes for a unified Holy Roman Empire and papacy and more importantly for Dante, a defeat of Florence. She fought with Siena behind the Ghibellines in Italy’s tumultuous fourteenth century and was eventually occupied by the Perugian army in 1358. Finally responding to her appeals for protection, Siena financed the building of her protective outer walls from 1371 to 1385. After which point, Siena began to invest in the town’s buildings and administration, finally making the Buonconventini citizens of Siena in 1480.

The thick outer walls protected generation after generation of merchants and farmers in periods of peace and strife, even withstanding occupation by the Florentine army who had besieged the last Sienese holdouts in nearby Montalcino in 1559. They were finally exposed by a double treatment of Nazi bombardment in both January and June 1944, which took her south facing gate, the porta Romana. Around 1955, Buonconvento’s farmers abandoned the newly mechanized farms en masse for industrial jobs, reducing the population by about one thousand, to what it is today. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, Buonconvento began to experience a rebirth with immigration by nationals and internationals alike, who are transforming the land that was abandoned by the mezzadria.