Guiglia

Guiglia stands at four hundred and ninety metres on the first hills to the right of the Panaro, and they call it the balcony of Emilia because from almost anywhere in the village you can see a good part of the province of Modena. The first documents that name it are rent contracts of 890, kept in the monastery of Nonantola. In the park of the Sassi di Roccamalatina, inside the comune's territory, stands the pieve of Trebbio, cited in a Nonantola charter of 996: it is one of the finest examples of Romanesque in the Apennines, with a plan of three naves and a crypt, the bell tower built on an earlier fortified tower, the carved portal on the south side and, in the baptistery beside it, a font of the ninth century with reliefs.

The castle, instead, has had more lives than usually fall to a building. It was raised on the hilltop around 1048 to defend against the Hungarian raids; it burned in 1361 in a clash between Guelphs and Ghibellines; rebuilt with a drawbridge and two new towers, in 1405 it was granted to the Pio of Carpi. In 1630 duke Francesco I d'Este invested with it marquis Francesco Montecuccoli who, since it no longer served for defence, turned it into one of the most sumptuous residences of the area: he removed the drawbridge and had a theatre built inside the house. At the end of the nineteenth century the heirs, weighed down by expenses, put it up for auction, and on 18 August 1897 it was bought by a Swiss engineer, Giovanni Beusch, who made it a thermal hotel and — the thing that served the village most — brought the drinking water of the Volti spring right up to the top of the village. The hotel closed in 1914; in 1939 the comune bought the castle; in 1944 the Germans used the stronghold as a military hospital, and on 15 April 1945 Allied bombs struck the village. After the war, in the Conventino next door, a casino even opened: the Ministry of the Interior had it closed within a few months.