Alfonsine

The town was born out of a marsh given away. In 1464 Borso d'Este made over to Teofilo Calcagnini the wetlands north of Fusignano; his son Alfonso carried on the drainage, and the reclaimed land took its owner's name: le Alfonsine. The plural has never dropped away, and in Romagnol people still say agl'Infulsen. This was a frontier disputed between Venetian Ravenna and the Este marquises, and the compromise of 1506 fixed it along the river Senio and the via Reale, a road raised on an embankment because all around the water stood higher than the fields.

Out of that watery geography the twentieth century made a front line: from the autumn of 1944 to the spring of 1945 the armies halted on the Senio, and Alfonsine was levelled. It is one of the very few towns rebuilt somewhere else: the centre used to stand on the right bank of the river, today it stands on the left, and the comune was awarded the silver medal for military valour. Outside the built-up area stands the sanctuary of the Madonna del Bosco, which began in 1714 with a votive image hung on a tree where a woodcutter had died: the church was blown apart by the bombs and rebuilt between 1951 and 1952, the image was not, because the parish priest had got it to safety in time.