The town of Pratovalle rises at 566 m a.s.l. in a valley floor close to the Pratomagno massif, almost overlooking the mountain village of Anciolina. It can be reached by deviating at San Giustino Valdarno from the provincial road of Setteponti, which with its 50 km from Reggello leads to Arezzo.
The territory on which the town stands is of high hills, characterized by chestnut, oak and hornbeam woods and by the Agna di Pratovalle stream, which a little further downstream gives rise to the so-called "trogòni", characteristic interconnected basins dug into the rock by action of water.
In the 12th century the area was the extreme offshoot of the Guicciardo da Loro family. [1] Subsequently, the geographer Emanuele Repetti notes that Pratovalle gives "the name to a parish church (S. Lucia a Prato-Valle) in the parish of S. Giustino" and that "the abbey of S. Trinita in Alpi had dominion there in the Middle Ages , called a Fonte benedetta ».
A writing dated 6 July 1540 made in the monastery of Santa Trinità in Alpe testifies to the construction of the mill in Pratovalle: the abbot Don Guido attributed to the rector of the church of Santa Maria di Faeto «the use of water and the bank of the Agna river for the purpose of building a mill belonging to the aforementioned church ". [2] The mill appears to have been restored in 1682, according to the records of the municipality of Anciolina to which Pratovalle belonged from the 16th century onwards; in 1710 it was managed by Antonio Forzoni, owner of the homonymous building in Casamona, who had the new millstones chiseled at his own expense. [3] The mill remained active until the 1940s. The Second World War caused a lot of damage to Pratovalle: the roof of the church of Santa Lucia was destroyed, almost the whole town was burned and the house in the piazzetta della Vecchia Compagnia was destroyed, of which the remains remain. The parish priest of Pratovalle, Don Dante Ricci, was shot in July 1944 by the Germans because he offered himself in the place of a partisan