Tuscan and Neapolitan cuisine are natural cousins.  Both hark back to days of poverty in their use humble, oft-discarded ingredients.  Both feature beans prominently. Both do weird things with offal, although that is true for nearly every Italian region.  Nowhere is the cucina povera link more apparent then with the peasant dish of ribollita.  Literally meaning, re-boiled, ribollita utilizes a mish-mash of ingredients that may have found their fates in rubbish bins were in not for the ingenuity of Tuscan home cooks in leaner times. The most compelling use of an otherwise discarded food would of course be stale bread.  Every region in Italy has its own take on stale bread usage.  This Tuscan version is among the most famous abroad.  Strangely a bastard cousin of ribollita is often called Tuscan White Bean Soup on generic restaurant menus in the United States  The resulting dish is a flaccid and less nutritious version of the original and oddly includes entirely too much pancetta.  Ribollita it is not.