Valsamoggia

Valsamoggia came into being on the first of January 2014 from the merger of Bazzano, Castello di Serravalle, Crespellano, Monteveglio and Savigno: it is the second most populous merged municipality in Italy, and the town hall is at Bazzano, even though Bazzano and Savigno were precisely the two that voted against in the referendum of 2012, which the merger carried by a majority barely above half. But those five villages had been bound together long before, and not by choice: they were the armed border between Bologna and Modena. Bologna had taken Bazzano and Savigno at the end of the thirteenth century, and an arbitration by pope Boniface VIII had confirmed them; in 1325 the Modenese retook the castle of Monteveglio by treachery, and after that only Zappolino stood on the road to Bologna.

There, on the fifteenth of November that year, one of the largest pitched battles of the Middle Ages was fought. The Bolognese were many times more numerous; the clash lasted two hours, and they lost it, because a charge on the flank caught them by surprise. More than two thousand men died. The Modenese came right up to the walls of Bologna, pulled down the castles along the way, from Crespellano to Anzola to Castelfranco, and instead of laying siege they mockingly ran four horse races outside the gate; then they went home carrying off a bucket taken from a well, the one Tassoni would later turn into the poem of the stolen bucket, La secchia rapita. The following January the peace gave everything back, castles and land, probably in exchange for money. Today, where the front line ran, there are the abbey of Monteveglio on its hill, the Bentivoglio fortress at Bazzano with its archaeological museum, and in November the white truffle fair of Savigno.