This paper presents an event stratigraphy based on data documenting the history of vegetation cover, lake-level changes and fire frequency, as well as volcanic eruptions, over the Last Glacial-early Holocene transition from a terrestrial sediment sequence recovered at Lake Accesa in Tuscany (north-central Italy). On the basis of an age-depth model inferred from 13 radiocarbon dates and six tephra horizons, the Oldest Dryas-Bølling warming event was dated to ca. 14 560 cal. yr BP and the Younger Dryas event to ca. 12 700-11 650 cal. yr BP. Four sub-millennial scale cooling phases were recognised from pollen data at ca. 14 300-14 200, 13 900-13 700, 13 400-13 100 and 11 350-11 150 cal.yrBP. The last three may be Mediterranean equivalents to the Older Dryas (GI-1d), Intra-Allerød (GI-1b) and Preboreal Oscillation (PBO) cooling events defined from the GRIP ice-core and indicate strong climatic linkages between the North Atlantic and Mediterranean areas during the last Termination. The first may correspond to Intra-Bølling cold oscillations registered by various palaeoclimatic records in the North Atlantic region. The lake-level record shows that the sub-millennial scale climatic oscillations which punctuated the last deglaciation were associated in central Italy with different successive patterns of hydrological changes from the Bølling warming to the 8.2ka cold reversal.