Villa Saletta

Villa Saletta is a frazione of the Italian comune of Palaia, in the province of Pisa, Tuscany.

Most of the village, about 4 km south-west of Palaia between the Roglio stream and its tributary the Tosola, is an uninhabited complex belonging to the Riccardi villa, with large farmworkers' houses, farm buildings and two churches.

The name Saletta (Saletto until the 10th century) is of Lombard origin and refers to a country settlement with a manor house, which in the Lombard language was called a Sala.

The first record of Saletto, as Emanuele Repetti tells us, is in the Archiepiscopal Archive of Lucca on 27 June 980, in connection with a reorganisation of local land leases.

Until 1260 its parish was dedicated to Saints Peter and Michael and lay within a large estate of the same name, as the catalogue of churches of the diocese of Lucca shows.

From the second half of the 1400s the village belonged to the Riccardi family.

Again from church records, we know that in 1833 the parish of Saints Peter and Michael at Saletta had 438 inhabitants.

During the Second World War Villa Saletta was occupied by both the German and the Italian armies, and was even raided by an SS unit.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian