Brisighella

Brisighella rests on three aligned crags of gypsum, and on each of them there is something. On the first the condottiero Maghinardo Pagani built, at the end of the thirteenth century, the most important stronghold of the Lamone valley; on the second Francesco Manfredi raised in 1310 the fortress, which the Venetians completed in 1508 by adding the tallest tower; on the third stands the sanctuary, and beside it the clock tower, remade in the nineteenth century where a defensive structure had stood before. The gypsum was not only the pedestal: it was building material and merchandise to sell, and together with the valley-floor road it explains why the town grew. The most singular street is raised above the ground and covered by arches all different from one another, and it is called the Donkeys' Road. On the first of February 1425 the Florentines under Oddo Fortebraccio and Niccolò Piccinino came up the valley to take the town: they failed, Fortebraccio lost his life there and Piccinino was taken prisoner.

The gypsum continues underground as well: here lies the eastern part of the park of the Vena del Gesso Romagnola, which UNESCO has included among the sites of karst in the evaporites of the northern Apennines. On the surface, instead, grows an olive called Nostrana di Brisighella, and the oil pressed from it was in 1996 the first Italian extra virgin to obtain protected designation of origin. But the town is known far away for two reasons that have nothing to do with oil. During the Second World War it hosted the headquarters of the Jewish Brigade: from here went out the operational instructions for the battalions and companies at the front. And here ends The Gadfly, the novel Ethel Lilian Voynich published in 1897: a book forgotten in the English-speaking countries and almost unknown in Italy, but read for generations in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe and in Mao's China.