San Benedetto Val di Sambro

Under these mountains ran a Roman road, the so-called Flaminia Minor, and it was two amateurs who found it again. In 1979 two archaeology enthusiasts from the area decided, on the strength of research they had done by themselves, to dig at the foot of Monte Bastione, and stretches of paving came out; other traces of the same road are near Pian di Balestra. The comune lies between the Setta and the Savena, and through the middle run the Sambruzzo and the Sambro, which gives it its name. The territory belonged to the Alberti of Prato until 1381, then to Bologna, then in fief to the Bianchi, who held the county of Piano until the unification of Italy. The most important village, at that time, was not San Benedetto but Piano del Voglio: the town hall was moved here in 1871, and only in 1924 did the comune take the name it bears today.

What strengthened San Benedetto was the Direttissima railway between Bologna and Florence, and it is the station that has tied the village's name to two massacres. On 4 August 1974 a bomb went off on the Italicus train, which was going from Rome to Munich: twelve dead and forty-four injured, and the attack was claimed by a neofascist terrorist organisation. A little more than ten years later, on 23 December 1984, another bomb went off near the station on the fast train 904 from Naples to Milan, full of people travelling for Christmas: seventeen dead and 267 injured. In 1994 a great landslide at Ca' di Sotto blocked the course of the Sambro and formed a lake; after the rains of October 2024 the landslide began to move again and the lake formed anew. At Castel dell'Alpi, where an older landslide created the reservoir, the only building that survived was the church of San Biagio.