Savignano sul Panaro

In 1925, digging the foundations of a house in the Mulino hamlet, Olindo Zambelli pulled from a little over a metre down a female figurine of the upper Palaeolithic: it is the Venus of Savignano, more than twenty thousand years old. It was bought by Giuseppe Graziosi, a sculptor born in that same hamlet, who understood at once what he was holding and gave it to the Pigorini prehistoric museum in Rome, where it still is. A sculptor bought a sculpture made two hundred centuries before him and handed it to the state. In the village museum there is a copy of the Venus and the skeleton of a female mammoth, found in 1980 on the bed of the Panaro.

Written history begins here much earlier than one might think: in 898 the emperor Louis II held a placito on this spot, in curte Saviniano. Savignano has also claimed a more recent and curious distinction, though: it is the first municipality entered in Italy's national heraldic register. The town council unanimously requested its coat of arms on the thirty-first of October 1861, the royal decree arrived on the twenty-third of February 1862, and on the fourth of December of that same year the village added the river to its name, becoming Savignano sul Panaro.