At Poggio alla Malva is preserved one of the monumental gates that gave access to the Barco Reale Mediceo, which is the largest game reserve established in 1626 that extended for at least 4000 acres including the lands that the Medici family had begun to acquire from Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The banned was bounded by a wall built of sandstone and lime draft 52 km long, which wounds in the territory extended from Poggio a Caiano and Carmignano, Artimino, Poggio alla Malva, Bacchereto, up to Faltognano, S. Amato and Porciano. The original appearance of the Barco is obtainable from the eighteenth-century drawings by Bernardo Sgrilli, an engineer in the service of the Medici.
Hunting in Barco was reserved for family members and their guests and gamekeepers (guards) watched that this rule should be respected.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century Barco began to undergo a slow drop: there was little wood which they could obtain, maintenance costs were very high and the policy of the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo aimed at liberalizing the resources of the area: 13 July 1772, Barco was banished.
At Poggio alla Malva is still the gateway to the Pinewood Barchetto, built reserves in the reserve at least seventy years before Barco, enclosing an area of a couple of miles.
