Bientina | Museum of Ancient History

The Museum of Ancient History and Territory in the deconsecrated church of San Girolamo was established in 1999 in memory of the archaeologist Vittorio Bernardi. It proposes a route that reconstructs the transformations of the territory between 1000 and the 5th century BC. Three sections display finds from the Etruscan period: kitchen ceramics, fragments decorated in Villanovan style, buccheri, objects and elements of the funerary equipment of a tomb found during the reclamation works in the marsh of Bientina.

The so-called “Padule“, the vast plain stretching between the Monti Pisani and the Colline delle Cerbaie, is what remains of the Lake of Bientina after the reclamation works ordered by Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, between 1824 and 1859. It was called Lake of Sesto because it was 6 km far from Lucca and was the largest of the Tuscan lakes: its draining (1853) and the advent of industrial agriculture radically changed the fauna and flora and led to the abandonment of particular fishing techniques.