Bagno di Romagna

The comune is called Bagno di Romagna, but the town hall is not in Bagno: it is in San Piero in Bagno, next door, and the reason is medieval. The Romans founded the Oppidum Balnei here because of the hot water, and Martial speaks of the baths in an epigram; the place was a stop on the road between Rome and Ravenna, and the Goths destroyed it in 540. It came back to life under the Guidi counts, who ringed it with walls and set up a market there: and that market place, a few kilometres further down along the Savio, filled with houses, churches and buildings and became a village in its own right, Borgo Sancti Petri, that is San Piero in Bagno. The daughter grew bigger than the mother and in the end took the town hall as well. In the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta the Camaldolese were present without a break from 1299 to 1808; there are kept the corporal of the eucharistic miracle, a triptych by Neri di Bicci and a Madonna and Child in stucco from the workshop of Donatello, and the font is of the year one thousand.

For centuries this was Tuscany, and not as a figure of speech: once the Guidi were gone, Bagno entered the Florentine orbit and remained a territory of the republic, then of the Medici, then of the grand duchy, with a captain sent out from Florence who lived in the palazzo del Capitano. In 1498 Giovanni de' Medici died here, the husband of Caterina Sforza, lady of Forlì, and father of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere; a son of Lorenzo il Magnifico came to the baths, and so did Benvenuto Cellini; and the village, which had lived on flocks and fields, took to making wooden rosaries and buttons and selling them all over Italy. In 1520 Leo X annexed the whole territory to the diocese of Sansepolcro, and there it stayed for more than four and a half centuries. The Landsknechts of Charles V, coming down towards the sack of Rome, destroyed the rocca of Corzano and plundered the district; with the stones of that fortress the sanctuary was later built. At unification Bagno found itself in the province of Florence, and only in 1923, when Mussolini moved the provincial borders to give importance to the province he was born in, did it pass to Forlì. In the war the village found itself on the Gothic Line: part of its territory belonged to the partisan republic of Corniolo, in July 1944 the nazi-fascists carried out the massacre of the Carnaio, and in September the Germans withdrew and the British came in.