The municipality of Pontedera is set near the confluence of the Era river and the Arno river in the province of Pisa. It has a population of about 26000 inhabitants and it keeps precious architectural works, as the Dome of St. Faustino, the Palazzo Pretorio and the Torre dell' Orologio.

The village was born in the XIII century an it takes its name from the bridge that used to cross the river Era in that period.
It immediately appeared as on of the Pisa ramparts at the border with the Republic of Florence and this is why it was at the centre of numerous fights, sieges and pillages. Its castle was razed to the ground in 1256 after a successful incursion by troops from Lucca and Florence, which had formed an alliance. Twenty years later, the town was annexed to the Florentine territories.
In the XIV century, Pontedera got back into Pisa's possession and it lived its most intense medieval phase of economic and demographic development.
The alternation of Pisa and Florence repeated during the middle decades of the XIV century, when the Pisans fortified the city again.
In 1361, the last great controversy between Florence and Pisa for the territory broke out and, at the end of it, Pontedera was definitively subjected to the Florentine Republic's possessions, even though it participated to the Pisan country insurrection in 1431. In that occasion, the city sided with Niccolò Piccinino's Milan troops, but its rebellion was repressed.
Thus, the Medicean era started in the town and it was characterized by poverty, epidemics and famine, to the extent that the Florentine rulers were obliged to grant the tax exemption until 1534 for all those who wished to live here.
Nevertheless, in 1554, the town experienced a new attack by the Medicean army as a punishment for giving shelter to one of the Medici's long-standing enemies. The closeness to the Arno river helped the population to stand up again thanks to agriculture and to the cattle river trade.
In 1565, Pontedera was a town hall which had the towns of Camugliano, Calcinaia, Gello, Montecastello, Pozzale and Ponsacco (the latter until 1637) within its jurisdiction.
With the arrival of the Lorraine at the end of the XVIII century, the Grand Duchy era transformed the town into one of the main points of reference of the Val d'Era's economy, until the village was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1860. In the last decades of the XIX century, a strong industrial presence, started to consolidate. It was particularly linked to the CMM, the automobile factory that the entrepreneur Mr. Piaggio transformed in a plant for the production of planes and military vehicles in 1926.
Later, the Piaggio factory became one of the most famous mopeds production businesses in the world with the creation of the well-known "Vespa" moped.