In Mutigliano, a small town across the river Serchio at the beginning of the Val Freddana, Giacomo Puccini stayed as a boy, as a guest of the parish priest, Don Giacinto Cantoni.He also performed one of his first professional activities in the parish church of SS. Ippolito e Cassiano, where he played the organ (the work of Michelangelo Crudeli, 1784) already in 1872, instructed the choir and rehearsed liturgical music.

Even after these experiences were completed (late 70s), Puccini kept alive his ties with the town, because of close friendships with several people and the presence in Mutigliano at different times of two priests: canon Roderigo Biagini (cousin of Giacomo, son of Chiara Puccini, sister of his father Michele) and Dante Del Fiorentino,who was to exercise his ministry later also in Torre del Lago (he moved to the United States, and was to be one of the first biographers and scholars of Puccini).

In the years of his great successes, Giacomo sometimes remembered that pleasant environment: in 1897 he wrote to hisfriend Alfredo Caselli from London: “I am a friend of Zola, Sardou and Daudet: who would have thought that eh? the mummer organist of Mutigliano?” and in 1908 to his sister Ramelde from Egypt, about the Nile: “It is nothing but the Freddana enlarged”.