The most certain origins of the neighboring villages can date back to the twenty years from 580 to 560 BC, in Roman times, when the inhabitants of the Apuan Alps were known as Liguri Apuani.

In the more sheltered areas and clearings of "Gordici" and "Valimoni", located in the woods, about 700 meters above sea level, called the Apuani luki ("prairies") there were the remains of small settlements.

[3] In 186 BC, the Ligurians inflicted a heavy defeat to the troops of the consul Quintus Marcius Philip, attracting hundreds of Roman legionaries in a series of narrow gorges and steep slopes of Montalto.

While the Frenchman Boumond and his family settled in Riomagno, Seravezza, the Englishman James Beresford (in the archives marked as Belessforde) and his partner Gybrin preferred Retignano.

As Fabrizio Federigi recalls, the retignanesi, a very industrious people, immediately committed themselves to reestablishing the activity of marble extraction in the Alta Versilia, reactivating also sites near Levigliani.

In 1821 the two entrepreneurs, Beresford and Grybrin, with local support, founded a company and rented by Francesco Guglielmi, for nine years and with the canon of 6000 scudi, a quarry (Messette) from which they shipped marble to England.

At the time of the Unification of Italy, in 1861, the inhabitants of the village were engaged in a large part in the excavations and the economy became mainly linked to marble, with a progressive less than half of the cultivation of chestnut trees and a reduction of land destined to crops.