Orentano is a frazione of Castelfranco di Sotto, sitting in the flat, green countryside of the province of Pisa — vineyards, olive groves and poplar rows, with Lucca, Pisa and the hills of San Miniato all within a half-hour drive. The village is first recorded in 848 AD, when its shepherds, farmers and eel-fishers pledged themselves to the Abbot of Sesto — but it is not a museum town: it is a quiet, lived-in village where the year is measured in sagre, church feasts and the winter Carnevale dei Bambini.
The Village
A real Tuscan village between Lucca and Pisa
When to come
Summer is sagra season — long volunteer-run food festival evenings under the plane trees. Late winter belongs to the Carnevale dei Bambini, the children's carnival the village has run since 1956 — dreamed up by the parish priest, who reckoned that if Viareggio and Rio could have a carnival, so could Orentano. It brings five masked parades in all, on the Sundays leading up to Shrove Tuesday (the dates shift with Easter each year) and on Martedì Grasso itself, when the festival closes with fireworks and the burning of the Testone, the carnival's giant straw effigy. November is olive-harvest and frantoio time in the surrounding countryside; spring is for walking and cycling the flat lanes between the farms.
Whatever the season, start with what's on — if there is a sagra or a village feast during your stay, that's the evening sorted.
The sound of the village
When something happens in Orentano, you hear it before you see it. The Complesso Folkloristico "La Ranocchia" — born in 1956, the same year as the first Carnevale — takes its name from the frogs you can hear croaking in the nearby Padule, and marches in white shirts, red braces and straw hats behind a frog mascot, playing folk instruments modelled on the old eel-fishing tools of the marsh. It has carried the village's name far: official band of Verona's Bacanal del Gnoco carnival and Italy's representative at Lugano's Festa dell'Uva. The village's concert band, the Filarmonica "Leone Lotti", bears the name of the maestro who first directed La Ranocchia. Between them, they animate the sagre, the summer evenings and the Carnevale parades — if you hear drums, follow them.
The four rioni
The village is divided into four rioni — Borgovalle, La Selva, Padule and La Sughera — quarters with their own colours and crests that compete in the village palio. If you spot flags in purple, black-and-gold, green or red around the streets, that's who lives there.