Serramazzoni

In the Statutes of Modena of 1327 this place appears as Serra de Legorzano, and it was not a village: it was a watershed, the natural bar between two mountains, without settlements worth noting. History was made by the others, that is by Monfestino, Pompeano, Riccò, Rocca Santa Maria, which today are hamlets. The Serra began to exist when a road came through: in 1751 the second route of the via Vandelli, later supplanted by the via Giardini, which crossed the Apennines to join the plain of Modena to Tuscany and made this pass a place to halt. To the name was added that of the Mazzoni, a local family which had in turn taken it from a working tool. In 1860 the town hall of Monfestino moved up here and the comune was called Monfestino in Serramazzoni, but at the start of the twentieth century there were still only a few houses in a row; the old name fell away only in 1948.

The town is made of things that pass through, and of one that never did. In the first decades of the twentieth century the Modena railways designed and laid out the electric line Modena-Pavullo-Lama, but financial straits and incompatibility with the new gauges meant the rails were never laid: the railway was built to the point of not being a railway. Along the via Giardini there is instead a little fountain with a plaque, and it is famous for a halt: that of Fausto Coppi, in 1953. The castle of Monfestino, fortified in the sixteenth century to withstand firearms and fallen into decline after the abolition of the fiefs, was bought in 1901 by the industrialist Fermo Corni, who built himself a neo-Gothic residence inside the medieval walls. And the primary school bears the name of a priest from Faeto who was a teacher and the inventor of a prototype typewriter.