Alto Reno Terme

Alto Reno Terme is a comune of 2016: it was born on the first of January of that year from the merger of Porretta Terme and Granaglione, and its main centre is Porretta. The arms they gave themselves are the exact sum of the two old ones: there is the ox drinking at the spring, which belonged to Porretta, and in the background the mountains with the chestnut tree topped by a star, which belonged to Granaglione. The two symbols also state two different economies. The waters of Porretta were known and used as far back as Roman times, and from them the town became the spa town of the Bolognese Apennines; Granaglione is the high, rural side, the one of chestnut groves, woods and stone villages along the ridges.

What you would not expect in an Apennine valley is that people come here for soul music. Porretta has a soul festival, it has a Museum of Soul, it is twinned with Memphis and it has a bridge named after Solomon Burke. The other museums are its own too: a museum of printing, one devoted to Demm motorcycles and mopeds, the ethnographic museum inside the Manservisi castle at Castelluccio and, at Granaglione, a wood collection opened in 2022 inside a teaching chestnut grove that forms part of the historic rural landscape called the Crown of Matilda. In the territory there is also a monumental chestnut tree, the one of Tresana, and a long file of oratories and country churches scattered through the hamlets, from the sanctuary of the Madonna del Faggio to the church of San Lorenzo di Lustrola.