Marzabotto

On the flat ground beside the Reno there was an Etruscan city, Kainua, founded at the end of the sixth century before Christ and abandoned in the fourth; that it was there has been known since 1551, and it is one of the best examples left of how the Etruscans laid out a city. The village that grew later had another name: it was called Caprara sopra Panico, and it became Marzabotto in 1882, when the seat of the comune had already come down to the valley floor. Marzabòt in Bolognese is the nightjar, a bird that still lives in the woods around Monte Sole; whether the name comes from the birds or from the nickname of some inhabitant, nobody knows. The village had no arms of its own, and in the eighteen hundreds it took those of the counts of Panico: a chequered lion with a rose in its left ear.

Between 29 September and 5 October 1944 SS units and the forces that went with them killed hundreds of civilians in the area of Monte Sole, going through the villages, the farms, the churches and the cemeteries; the killing did not stop at this comune's boundary, but took in Monzuno and Grizzana Morandi as well. It is one of the largest massacres of civilians carried out by German forces in Italy. Marzabotto was given the gold medal for military valour in 1948, and the ground where it all happened is today the historic park of Monte Sole, which stretches across those same three comuni, between the valley of the Reno and that of the Setta.