History

Tuscany as a territorial state first, as a contemporary administrative region then, in its gestation and historical development had characters very distant from the ecclesiastical province of Tuscia, one of the four that made up the conciliar region of the average Italy. Different yet parallel to that of the formation and evolution of the civil districts, the history of the Tuscan dioceses still appears to a large extent as a mosaic with many lost tesserae, at least for the most ancient ages. Already at the origins of the primitive territorial organization of the Church, after the "missionary" phase of Christianization, the conditioning imposed by the becoming of the political-military situations in late antiquity interfered in that tendency to overlap between the Roman administrative realities - the municipia - and the nascent Christian territorial organization which was supposed as an original character for the formation of diocesan districts. Far from being taken for granted, this hypothetical continuity had to clash, among other things, with the chronological differences of a population which led, especially in the passage between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, to recession or even to the disappearance of urban nuclei and of new anthropic poles. Different in its boundaries as in its morphologies, Etruria, seventh among the Augustan regiones, had included the vast Tyrrhenian region north of Rome roughly between the Tiber and Arno basins. Having become "Tuscia" following the diocletian order and united with Umbria, it included a much larger territorial area than today's Tuscany.