known as the Chianti Mountain. This area was noted for its winemaking with the villages of Castellina, Gaiole and Radda gaining particular renown. These three villages formed a Lega del Chianti (League of Chianti) that the Florentine merchants would market as wines of distinction. In 1716 Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany issued an edict legislating that the three villages of the Lega del Chianti as well as the village of Greve and a 2-mile (3 km) hillside north of Greve near Spedaluzza as the only officially recognized producers of Chianti. This delineation existed until July 1932, when the Italian government expanded the Chianti zone to include the outlying areas of Barberino Val d'Elsa, Chiocchio, Robbiano, San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Strada. Some of these areas, such as Robbiano, included large swaths of hillside near Florence (in what is now the Chianti DOCG sub-zone the Colli Fiorentini) that produced lighter bodied wines that were not suitable for aging or improving in quality. The 1932 expansion was canonized into DOC regulations in 1966. In 1984 the Chianti Classico and the greater Chianti region were separated and each given their own DOCG ranking. The boundaries were to cover an area of approximate 100 square miles (259 square kilometers) between Florence to the north and Siena to the south. The four communes of Castellina, Gaiole, Greve and Radda were included along with parts of Barberino Val d'Elsa, San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Tavarnelle Val di Pesa in the province of Florence as well as Castelnuovo Berardenga and Poggibonsi in the province of Siena. Early history to the Renaissance The early history of Chianti is very much intertwined with the history of the entire Tuscany region. The history of viticulture in the area dates back to its settlements by the Etruscans in the eighth century BC. Amphora remnants originating from the region show that Tuscan wine was exported to southern Italy and Gaul as early as the seventh century BC before both areas begun to actively cultivate grape vines themselves. From the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries were the main purveyors of wines in the region. As the aristocratic and merchant classes emerged, they inherited the sharecropping system of agriculture known as mezzadria. This system took its name from the arrangement whereby the landowner provides the land and resources for planting in