Dozza

Since 1960 the houses of Dozza have been painted: about a hundred works made directly on the walls by Italian and foreign artists, and every two years, in September, a festival adds new ones. In that same year the fortress changed hands: the Campeggi and the Malvezzi had lived in it since the fifteen hundreds, and in 1960 it passed to the comune, which has made it a museum — the kitchens are still there with their utensils, and in the cellars is the regional wine library of Emilia-Romagna. The fortress and the walls that ring the village are the work of Caterina Sforza, who held Dozza in fief for five years at the end of the fourteen hundreds.

The name comes from the medieval Latin ducia, a spout or a pipe: a conduit, a channel that carries water. And the arms say the same thing, because on them there is a wingless griffin drinking the water that comes out of a pipe. Perhaps there was an old aqueduct here that gathered the water from Monte del Re into a cistern, for the months of drought. The village stands on a boundary: whoever comes from Bologna along the via Emilia enters historic Romagna at Dozza, and the line is marked by the Sillaro stream, which runs through this territory. In 1531 the fief went to cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi, who in those same years was handling for the pope the divorce case of the king of England.