Even Tuscany and the Neighboring Regions Were Struggling With the Little Ice Age (LIA)

Italy is very rich in archival sources containing meteorological records. All of this information is of great interest for an accurate historical reconstruction of the past climate of Italy. Their rigorous historiographic and climatological analysis would allow us to study in depth the Italian climatic variations, from month to month, at least for the last millennium. This work comes from a fruitful collaboration between the Agricultural Research Council – Research Unit for Climatology and Meteorology applied to Agriculture (CRA-CMA) and the European University of Rome – Geographic Research and Application Laboratory (GREAL). It is a historical research aimed at analyzing the beginning and the central phase of the Little Ice Age (about 1550÷1850 A.D.), for Tuscany and the neighboring regions, using only qualitative weather observations. Documents used for this study are mainly preserved in ecclesiastical and municipal archives. They contain a large number of weather information. Each of them, both direct and indirect, has been analyzed on the basis of its date of entry, its author, the historic and cultural context in which it was noted and the reason which led the author to write it down (historiographic analysis). All that in order to check the good quality of the weather news just recovered. It follows that such qualitative meteorological data may be considered valid, as a whole. Three distinct sets of qualitative observations have been recovered and taken into account. The series recorded in Popiglio (a picturesque village in the Pistoia Apennines, at an altitude of 523 meters above sea level) is the first we have studied. It covers the period 1568÷1595 and is representative of the beginning of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in Tuscany. Its preliminary assessment confirms the general trend of this phase: increasingly cold winters and cool and rainy summers, sometimes even with snow and frost. The second descriptive set concerns Vallombrosa (near Florence, at almost 1000 meters above sea level), another location of the Tuscan Apennines. It consists of short notes written by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey on atmospheric phenomena they perceived as abnormal or exceptional. We have obtained them from their memories (“Ricordanze di Vallombrosa”). The time covered by the series is very short, from 1688 to 1695, but representative of the central phase of the Little Ice Age, that was the coldest period of this climatic cycle in many European regions. It is not a mere coincidence that in Vallombrosa it snowed even in summer! This research has also been extended to places of neighboring regions, such as in the Province of Ancona and Passignano sul Trasimeno (near Perugia), in order to analyze, through some local documentary sources, the other relevant aspect of the Little Ice Age: the increase in precipitation and frequency of floods. Our paper concludes with a brief review about the hard frosty winter of 1709 as far as Tuscany and adjacent regions are concerned. No anomaly/intensity index has yet been assigned to the climatic events so far recovered. Unfortunately, this work has not been completed, due to lack of funds. Therefore, our goal is to illustrate the climatic information regarded as more significant, although in an empirical way, for our climate reconstruction.