Inside Piancastagnaio: The Smallest Italian Town With a Professional Football Team

About 50 miles south of Siena, the town of Piancastagnaio is home to just over 3800 souls.

It is a speck on the radar, tucked away in the Tuscan hills, at the southern end of the Siena province on the slopes of Mount Amiata, in the region’s chestnut belt. The town’s name roughly translates to Chestnut Plain.

It is also the smallest town to host a professional football club in Italy this season, as it is home to Serie C side Pianese,

Built around a 12th-century fortress that fell first to Siena and later to the Medici family, the town features a 16th-century palazzo embedded in its old defences – a Renaissance imprint resting directly upon Aldobrandeschi foundations.

Meanwhile, the mining museum chronicles the ancient cinnabar and mercury trade that sustained the mountain from antiquity until 1982, an industrial era that has since yielded to the quiet dominance of the chestnut harvest.

As is the case in Siena, every August the town splits into four contrade – the districts of Borgo, Castello, Coro, and Voltaia – for the local palio, a historic bareback horse race, while in October the Crastatone, the oldest chestnut festival on Monte Amiata, is the place to be to celebrate the latest harvest of the local product. The festival has been held for the past 58 years and runs between October 30 and November 1 this year.

Piancastagnaio is exactly what one may imagine an idyllic town in Tuscany to look like. It is perched on a hilltop with a splendid view over the valleys. A handful of quiet, cobbled streets criss-cross the historic centre through a cluster of near-perfectly maintained houses with slanted roofs, a well-preserved church and the obligatory medieval tower.

And, of course, a football ground. The Stadio Comunale, with a capacity of 1500, can accommodate almost half of the town’s population, and has been home to the Bianconeri since the 1930s.

A mainstay of Serie D, Italian football’s fourth division, Pianese’s main claim to fame is being the first professional club to report a case of Covid-19, when King Udoh – who has since joined Trapani – tested positive in February 2020.

The Bianconeri had first attained professional status just over six months earlier, but their sojourn in Serie C lasted just one season as they made a swift return to the fourth tier.

Pianese punched well above their weight in their first campaign back among the pros, finishing sixth last term to secure a play-off spot. After dispatching Ternana and Juventus Next Gen in the regional phase, they booked their ticket to the national rounds – where a 2–2 aggregate draw with Lecco saw them eliminated due to their lower finish in the regular season.

A repeat of that exhilarating run looks highly unlikely this term, with Pianese near the foot of the table after winning just one of their first eight games – against Ravenna.

Pinpointing when the club was actually born is surprisingly complicated. Their official website lists 1932 – two years after the date emblazoned on their own crest.

Having won the amateur provincial championship in 1954 and 1959, Pianese were only officially registered with the FIGC – Italy’s football association – over a decade later when they were still in the Terza Categoria, the ninth tier of the pyramid.

Despite their lowly status, they became something of a pre-season staple for bigger clubs, with Bari, Pisa and Foggia all visiting between 1968 and 1973, before a meeting with Cagliari in 1976, when the Rossoblu were only six years removed from their maiden Scudetto.

Two decades spent bouncing across the sixth and seventh tiers ended at the turn of the century, when Pianese established themselves in Promozione – the fifth division – and eventually won promotion to Serie D in 2010.

Almost a decade later, they made it to the professional arena and at the weekend they beat high-flying Ravenna, who have World Cup winner Ronaldinho on their books.

The smallest town in professional football in Italy welcoming the club partly-owned by one of the greatest players to have ever graced the beautiful game. Par for the course for the wonderful world of Serie C.