Mercato Saraceno

On the arms of Mercato Saraceno there is a Moor's head, blindfolded and turned, and in the nineteenth-century versions it also had a gold earring and a green scarf. It is not the memory of a raid: it is a canting arm, and what it tells is a man's name. The documents say that beside the water mill, which was already there in 1153, a local lord called Saraceno degli Onesti wanted to open a market, on the open ground by the river — and that was the point of the only bridge over the Savio between Cesena and Bagno di Romagna. Saraceno's market, precisely. The town was later taken by the archbishop of Ravenna, disputed between the Malatesta and the Ordelaffi and occupied by Cesare Borgia, but the name and the face on the arms have stayed the ones of the first day.

In the nineteenth century the valley filled up with sulphur. The mining made the population grow and the roads improve, and it brought with it an intense trade-union life, made of demands about the miners' conditions: men like Andrea Costa came here to take them up. Of that season and of the one after it the buildings remain: palazzo Dolcini, on the square, was built in 1926 as the local house of the Fascist party to a design by the Forlì architect Ugo Dolcini, and after a restoration begun in the sixties it has become the town's cultural centre, while the municipal library sits inside the former slaughterhouse. The old centre is laid out on terraces looking over the Savio; outside, on the hills, stands the pieve of Santi Cosma e Damiano, the oldest church in the district, which goes back to the middle of the ninth century.