Ozzano dell'Emilia

Ozzano dell'Emilia has 12,870 inhabitants south-east of Bologna, in a territory shaped like a long narrow rectangle that climbs from the plain up to the Gessi Bolognesi and the badlands of the Abbadessa. The oldest thing here is a city: Claterna, founded in the second century before Christ along the road that would become the via Emilia, and whose remains lie in the fields of the comune. The village itself only became "dell'Emilia" in 1862, by royal decree, to tell it apart from the other Ozzanos.

But the house that matters is in via Galvani, at number 75. Luigi Galvani lived there and did his first experiments there, and the building still carries a medallion with his portrait and two plaques. The detail that makes the thing concrete is behind the house: at the bottom of the garden runs the Rio Marzano, a stream far fuller of water then than it is now, and it was the Rio Marzano that supplied him with the frogs. Elsewhere in the territory there is instead a story of saints: the blessed Lucia of Settefonti, a Camaldolese nun of the twelfth century, to whom is attributed the miracle of a crusader knight pulled out of captivity in the Holy Land; her cult was authorized in 1508, and in 1573 her bones were moved from the by then crumbling little church at Settefonti.