Grizzana Morandi

This comune has changed its name twice. Until 1882 it was called Tavernola Reno; then the administration asked to take the name of the main settlement, and it became Grizzana. In 1985 it added a surname: Morandi, for the painter Giorgio Morandi, who spent long periods here and painted these hills for years. His summer house, near the old centre, is today a museum where you can visit the library, the studio and the bedroom. In the same territory, at Ponte, stands the Rocchetta Mattei, the residence count Cesare Mattei had built for himself: a piece of nineteenth-century eclecticism full of Moorish echoes. A little further on rises the church of Santa Maria Assunta, designed in the seventies by the Finn Alvar Aalto: everybody calls it the church of Riola because it serves that village, but it stands on the right bank of the Reno, that is, here.

The oldest stones are higher up. At Vimignano there is the borgo of La Scola, a group of medieval houses of the thirteenth century left almost intact; above Campolo, in the park of Montovolo, the sanctuary and the oratory of Santa Caterina, which are of the twelfth century. Then there is 1944. On 30 September of that year German troops killed eight workers near the hamlet of Famaticcia di Savignano; and a part of the one thousand eight hundred and thirty victims of the Monte Sole massacre were killed within the boundaries of this comune. On monte di Stanco, since 2018, a monument recalls the South African soldiers who fell to free this area; their military cemetery is at Castiglione dei Pepoli. There is, finally, a tradition that measures time in a way all of its own: every fifty years the image of the Blessed Virgin of San Luca is carried up here. The last time was in 1995.