The churches of the saints Ippolito and Cassiano, the church of San Leonardo in San Quirico, which is the municipal seat, and the Abbey of Santa Maria in the hamlet of Montepiano can be admired in the town of Vernio in the province of Prato.
The town’s name was born on the wake of the campaigns that the Romans led against the Celtic populations of the Cisalpine Gaul. The first inhabitants of the town, that today amount to about 5500, were the legionaries hired for the battle against the Gauls. In effect, its current toponym derives from the Latin word “hibernia” (winter) and it indicates its original function as a winter camp for the Roman troops heading towards the Po Valley.
After the fall of the Empire, the Lombards settled here and their economy was based on sheep-breeding and sylviculture that exactly fitted the characteristics of the Bisenzio Valley.
The first feudatories of this place were the Lombard-born Cadolingi who were substituted by the Alberti in the XII century. The latter created a thick network of fortifications in the Bisenzio territory with the aim to control the Apennines of Prato. At the borders of their properties, however, the flourishing and thriving town of Prato was beginning to establish its presence until the Vaiano.
The real reserve of the local economy were the parishes and the monasteries rising there that started the cultivation of many lands and many activities, such as mills, factories and foundries intended for the exploitation of the river Bisenzio’s waters.
When the Aberti were decaying, they left Vernio in 1332 and sold it to the Bardi, a family of rich bankers and traders coming from Florence who transformed the area of the current town into a shopping centre specialized in the river transportation of wood towards Prato. San Quirico became the chief town and the residence of the new counts of Vernio since the XVII century, while the small town of Vernio remained more isolated and linked to the old activities. The Bardi’s residence then became the current Palazzo Municipale.
The counts Bardi dominated upright on Vernio even succeeding into getting out of the Tuscan Grand Duchy’s jurisdiction. The Cisalpine Republic created by Napoleon in 1797 ended the centuries-old story of this small enclave. The counts’ deposition occurred in the frame of the French emperor’s revolutionary policy that aimed at the abolition of feudalism. In 1811, Vernio was then transferred in the Dipartimento dell’Arno under the direct control of the French monarchy. The Grand Duchy could take possession of it in 1815 since the Congress of Vienna gave Vernio to it in 1815, after Napoleon’s fall.