The town of Figline Valdarno is set at the foot of the Mount Chianti and it is in the province of Florence. It is an ancient commercial village and it is at 126 m. of altitude and has a population of about 14,000 inhabitants. Numerous fossils dating to the Pleistocene have been found in the territory.

During the Stone Age, the area of the Valdarno was already populated as the rich collection of tools and manufactured flint found in the area of Soffena, San Giovenale, Cascia and Cancelli demonstrate. Yet, the Etruscan presence here was not as significant as in other places.
At the time of the Romans, instead, the area of the modern Valdarno experienced an incredibly rich period linked to agriculture. A testimony of this comes from Livy's chronicles. They describe the Valdarno, that the Carthaginian leader Hannibal was crossing, as a rich and fertile land. The toponym Figline comes from a Latin word "Figalinae" that indicates a place where clay was manufactured to produce pottery. This is a tradition that the Romans certainly inherited from the Etruscans.
The history of the town started around the year 1000. More precisely, a document dating to 1008 testifies the existence of the stronghold of "Fegghine" which belonged to the Uberti, a powerful feudatory family that lived in the castle of Gaville.
The news on the first churches dates to one century later. Later, some inhabitants of the settlement on the hills founded the "forum" of Figline, a trade outpost, that also exploited its closeness to the Arno river. Soon, many built-up areas and warehouses for goods started to rise here. The destruction of Fiesole carried out by the Florentines further increased the strategic and economic importance of the new "mercatale".
In 1198, Figline made part of the dispute between the free towns in Tuscany' and the Empire by joining the first ones. Nevertheless, when the fight between anti-imperialist Guelfs and Ghibellines went off, the village was influenced by the Ubertini and the town allied with the pro-imperial towns.
Thus, the Florentines invaded and devastated the castle of Fegghine in 1250 and, consequently, a population increase took place in the "forum" of the valley. The latter slowly grew into a city. Between 1353 and 1375, Figline was fortified and it became the ideal refuge for the refugee who came from the ancient besieged feudal castles later demolished by the Florentines in the ambit of their campaigns against the feudatories of the countryside. In 1800, Napoleon founded the Kingdom of Etruria in Tuscany and chose Figline as the seat of the "Accademia Valdarnese del Poggio", a real temple of naturalism, where some collections of fossils found in the territory of the Valdarno were accumulated. At that time, also the famous researcher Georges Cuvier, one of the founders of Palaeontology, attended this town. The goods of the Academy were later transferred to Montevarchi where they can still be seen in the Museum. In the old town centre of Figline Valdarno that is sited at the feet of Mount Chianti, the Collegiata of Santa Maria and the Palazzo Pretorio can be admired. Also the Church of San Francesco and the Church of San Biagio are remarkably important, too. In the latter church, Masaccio, who was born in the Valdarno, carried out his first work. It is the "Trittico di San Giovenale", realized in 1422 A.D.