Legal expert, painter, and amateur botanist, Piero Calamandrei collected in his youth samples of wild plants of the regions of Florence and Montepulciano. His later professional and poetical writings echo his «loving intimacy with the trees and the plants» of the Tuscan territory, that he mainly conceived as a 'common home'. Among the ruins of war, the «flowers friends» renewed the hope that the word «homeland”»could reappear, as «mysterious and fresh» as ever.