Castelfranco Emilia

This too is a free town, and it is born of the same recipe as the others: around 1226 Bologna founded a Borgo Franco here and granted the new inhabitants favourable fiscal conditions, because the place was the last Bolognese centre before the border with hostile Modena and had to serve as a defensive outpost. Here is the irony: the town built against Modena is today in the province of Modena, because in 1929 it was detached from Bologna and handed over. The tie, though, has held: the dialect spoken here is a Bolognese one, and the parish still belongs to the diocese of Bologna. Indeed, having passed with Bologna to the Papal State in 1506, Castelfranco is the only comune in the Modena area that was never part of the Duchy of Modena.

Before the borough, there was Forum Gallorum here, a settlement on the via Emilia among the marshes, and in 43 BC a battle of the war of Modena was fought there between Antony and the consuls Hirtius and Pansa: Cicero writes of it in the Letters to Friends, and so does Appian. Much later the town took for itself a founding scene of Italian gastronomy: here, legend says, an innkeeper spied through a keyhole on a noblewoman — for some, Venus herself — and out of what he saw made the tortellino, the most disputed navel between Modena and Bologna. The September festival and the traditional tortellino celebrate the myth with due Emilian seriousness. On the via Emilia there remain the parish church with its Guercino and the Napoleonic urban fort; and the town carries the silver medal for civil valour, for the eleven townspeople killed by German soldiers during the war.