Mordano

The comune has two villages, and in 1494 one paid for the other. Girolamo Riario had died in 1488 and the lordships of Imola and Forlì had passed to his widow, Caterina Sforza; when Charles VIII came down towards Naples and reached Romagna with two thousand soldiers, he made for Bubano to force the Sforza to take his side. The French tried to besiege the fortress, reckoning to take it in a few days, but the resistance was such as to make them see it would cost too much blood. So they turned instead on the fortress of Mordano: that one they took, and they entered the village, sacked it and massacred its people. Of the fortress of Bubano, which had held, there remains today the Sforza tower, strengthened at the end of the fifteenth century and then pulled down piece by piece once it was no longer of use.

Bubano, for that matter, was born out of mud, and its name says so. In the early Middle Ages there was here the fundus Bibani, wooded ground, untilled and half marsh; it was the reclamation promoted between the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria in Regola of Imola that made it the massa Bibani, and the new arable land drew people from round about until a village came out of it. In 1802 the comune of Bubano was joined to that of Mordano, and today the little hamlet of Chiavica also belongs to the territory. At the entrance of Mordano stand two twin towers, built in the eighteen-eighties to a design by the engineer Giovanni Brusi, which took as their model those of the arsenal of Venice; and in the countryside the roads still draw the squared lattice of the Roman centuriation, with meshes of a little more than seven hundred metres a side.