Tuscany's forgotten mining republic — a 13th-century Romanesque cathedral on a sloping medieval piazza, Europe's first written mining code, and the Maremma wine country in the valley below
Massa Marittima is a hilltop medieval city in the Maremma region of southern Tuscany — the capital of the Colline Metallifere ('metalliferous hills'), a copper and iron mining region that made the city wealthy enough to commission one of Tuscany's finest Romanesque cathedrals. The Piazza Garibaldi, a sloping medieval square flanked by the Duomo di San Cerbone (begun 1228), is considered alongside Siena's Piazza del Campo as the most perfectly preserved medieval civic space in Tuscany.
The area's mineral wealth — copper, iron, silver — was exploited since Etruscan times. The city reached its peak as an independent republic in 1225 when the 'Codex Constitutionum' — Europe's earliest known mining code — was compiled here, establishing legal frameworks for mineral rights, safety, and compensation that influenced European mining law. Siena conquered Massa Marittima in 1335, ending its independence. Population collapse during 14th-century plague outbreaks left the medieval city intact in a way that later redevelopment would have erased.