The congressman's interests coincided with the aspirations of Florentine banker Emanuele Orazio Fenzi, who had long wanted to build a railway track between Florence and the municipalities of San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Greve in Chianti where he had land holdings.

335 of the newspaper La Nazione, the French engineer Jean Louis Protche, designer of the Porrettana railroad, illustrated a project for a Bologna-Florence-Rome direttissima line,[6] which in the Bologna-Florence section was very similar to the one later built in 1934, but from Florence to Rome proposed to pass over a route via Siena and Rapolano Terme.

Poggi's response came on 7 June 1888, in a leaflet distributed throughout the city and its environs,[9] in which he said: A steam tramway intended to carry from Florence to Chianti, and vice versa, merchandise, livestock, passengers, workers, etc.

Emanuele Fenzi's response was clear: Firstly, one cannot seriously classify as a public promenade the entire stretch of the Avenue from the barrier of San Niccolò to Piazzale Michelangiolo, which is no less than 2,200 m. long.

Not a soul is ever to be found there, and the City Hall knows it, and for watering they never spend a penny there, and in the matter of lighting you see one oil lamp placed there every 500 m.[11]In a second instance a request was made to move the track from the center of the roadway to one of the side avenues.

Other protests came from both the Superintendent of Public Gardens and Promenades Angiolo Pucci, who feared damage to the trees, sidewalks and benches of the avenue, and again from Poggi, who lost the first assault and embraced the environmentalist cause with these words: The steam emissions will certainly harm the plants close to the rail, and in the long run they will sadden even the most discrete ones; and so the walkway will become a street like any other.

[11]Emanuele Orazio Fenzi was a dynamic and persistent opponent who, exploiting Sonnino's influence, succeeded in convincing the Florence City Hall to totally accept his project.

Peruzzi wrote, among other things: Does it really seem a great evil if some outsider, going to visit the Avenue of the Hills, sees for a moment a train of flasks of good Chianti wine passing by?

The text of the decree read as follows: Authorization to the company Emanuele Fenzi e C. to build and operate with steam traction a tramway from the railway station of Florence-Porta alla Croce to Greve and San Casciano on the basis of the project of Engineer Giuseppe Lenci.

[13]Once the go-ahead was given for the work, the Società Italiana per la Tramvia del Chianti e dei Colli Fiorentini was established in 1889 with headquarters in Piazza della Signoria.

After the bankruptcy of its major shareholder, the Società per la Tramvia del Chianti e dei Colli Fiorentini continued to provide service on the existing lines but was ordered to pay debts to creditors.

In the article published by La Nazione on 5 April 1893, the day of the arrival in Greve, it is written that the guests gathered in Piazza della Signoria where, accompanied by the sound of the fanfare, they boarded three first-class carriages; these carriages, drawn by horses, led the guests to the tramway station located at the place called the Pratoni di Porta alla Croce (today the intersection of Viale Antonio Gramsci and Viale Giuseppe Mazzini), where they were hitched to the locomotive "Niccolò da Uzzano."

[27] Its adventure was short-lived, and between late 1896 and early 1897 the operating company was absorbed by the Société Générale des Chemins de Fer Economiques,[28] which was based in Brussels and was therefore renamed the Belgian.

The inhabitants of the area of Viale Petrarca, that is, just beyond the terminus of Porta Romana where the rolling stock was parked, began to complain about the great noise that was made, even in the nighttime hours, by the movement of materials.

The municipality of Florence intervened and prohibited the loading and unloading of goods between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.[30] Travelers also had to face new problems: on 7 April 1900, the operating company was heavily fined because the 7:06 p.m. train left at 7:40 p.m.

[34] Another serious accident occurred on 11 December 1913 at Le Strette, near Falciani, when two convoys coming from opposite directions collided head-on: this time, too, there were numerous injuries and the two locomotives were destroyed.

[35] The second accident was an opportunity to plead on behalf of all Chianti's citizens for a safer, faster service, with a greater number of runs, and above all to demand, again, that the entire line be electrified.

Is it permissible today, then, that a town like San Casciano, which is only 16 kilometers from Florence and is full of agricultural and commercial life, should be content with only three streetcar departures a day, carried out with two old carriages and sometimes with only one, mixed, for passenger freight service?

Already by the beginning of the 20th century, the intensely used line appeared worn out, so much so that in 1906 the municipalities of San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Greve in Chianti had been forced to take legal action against the operating company because of its deplorable state.

[39] World War I exacerbated the crisis and a trip on the tramway became a real adventure: timetables were not respected and the condition of the line deteriorated to the point that it no longer offered the slightest safety.

[39] With the conflict over, coal slowly began to return but little maintenance was done to the rolling stock: the economic situation of the Tramways Company was desperate and all improvements were postponed until a future date.

Most notable in this second battle was the magazine "Il Chianti," which was printed in Greve,[note 6] which published between February and March 1932 a whole series of articles arguing for the indispensability of the tramway and its irreplaceability with other means of transportation.

Due to the accumulated debt owed to the Valdarno company, the Società dei Tramvai Fiorentini e del Chianti went bankrupt on 24 September 1934 by a ruling of the Civil Court of Florence.

If Greve had not had local private firms engaged in trucking, it would have remained out of even any relation to the commercial railway station in the city in which all our traffic is headed....[47]The closure of the tramway thus led to a worsening of the economic situation of several Chianti companies.

[note 7] Having passed the village of Tavarnuzze, the convoys passed through the Mulino del Diavolo locality, then through the Scopeti bridge locality and then launched into the plain formed by the Greve River (the area of the present-day American cemetery) to the narrow Bifonica gorge and shortly after reached the Falciani village, where a station equipped with a materials depot was located and where a bifurcation was placed: remaining on the main track they went to Greve in Chianti while with the other they went to San Casciano in Val di Pesa along a route characterized by a pronounced gradient.

The variant presented provided for the construction, in place of the railway underpass, of a temporary track that was to be implanted along Viale Principe Eugenio and that would turn right to reach the station being dismantled.

[53] The vehicles were built by the Krauss &C. Company of Munich, and three of them, named Pier Vettori, Passignano and Niccolò da Uzzano, dated back to 1889 and were three-axle with a power output of 89 kW (120 hp).

Also dating from 1889 were six other locomotives still with three axles but with a power output of 74 kW (100 hp) and were named Acciaioli, Accursio, Buondelmonti, Giovanni da Verrazzano, Machiavelli and Greve (the latter built in 1893).

Domenico Giuliotti resided in the very village of Greve, and to visit him, numerous of his friends used and described the tramway; among them are Giovanni Papini, Nicola Lisi, Bruno Cicognani, Ferdinando Paolieri, Ardengo Soffici and Raffaello Romanelli.

[67] Nicola Lisi spoke of the streetcar in the 1935 Ragguaglio dell'attività letteraria dei cattolici when he described his trip on the little train to visit Giuliotti in his house referred to as the cave of the wild man.