Monterenzio

Monterenzio stretches along the ridge that divides the valley of the Idice from that of the Sillaro, and in pre-Roman times that ridge was a road between two worlds: it linked northern Etruria to the Po plain. The two most important archaeological areas tell the story: the Etruscan-Celtic settlement of Monte Bibele, a little south of Bisano, on the left of the Idice, and the necropolis of Monterenzio Vecchio, some kilometres further south, on the ridge. Etruscans and Celts together, in a territory of passage and of friction. That world ended in 187 before Christ, when the consul Gaius Flaminius completed the conquest of the Apennine, finally subduing the Ligurian peoples; and along the very ridge of the necropolis runs one of the proposed traces of the road the consul had built in that year, the via Flaminia Minor, which Livy writes about.

The village, as a name, appears much later, and it appears attached to a person: the first document indirectly attesting its existence is of 998, a placitum held at Imola by Olderico as envoy of the emperor Otto III, and among the judges called there is one Teucio of Monte Renzolo. Those were the years of the Hungarian raids, and all over Europe strongholds were rising around which the local communities gathered: the castrum of Monterenzio was born then, and its last vestiges are today in a farmhouse called the Torre dei Pagani. The territory is full of geosites: the mud volcanoes of Sassuno, which here they call the Dragon, with their eruptive phenomena; the Castelloni di Pizzano, also called the pyramids of Fantini, today barely visible between vegetation and human works; the Bisano mine, from which copper was extracted for a few years in the second half of the eighteen hundreds; the Sasso della Mantesca, an ophiolite formation tied to the myth of San Zanobi and once quarried to make millstones; and the Sasso Nero, another ophiolite, which in the Middle Ages had on its summit one of the castles of the Bolognese contado. The comune's arms were recognised in 1939 and carry the chief of Anjou, typical of many comuni of the Bologna countryside.