Albinea

When in 1859 Farini gave the comune back its autonomy, a problem became clear: the territory held no settlement of any size, only farmhouses and scattered country dwellings. The town hall was therefore placed at the exact middle point, in a locality called La Fola, at the inn that gave it its name; the locality was then renamed Albinea, to tie it to the first historic settlement of the area. That original Albinea, the village grown at the foot of the pieve, had meanwhile renamed itself: Brolo della pieve di Albinea, and finally Broletto. In the Reggio dialect the comune is still called La Fôla. The pieve appears in a diploma of Otto the Second of 980, from 1070 castle and pieve belonged to the bishop of Reggio, and from 1412 to 1730 the fief was held by the Manfredi.

On the night of the twenty-seventh of March 1945 the villas of Botteghe, seat of the command of the German mountain corps deployed on the Gothic Line, were attacked by surprise by about a hundred men of the so-called Allied Battalion: British paratroopers of the Second SAS, Italian partisans of the special squad Gufo nero of the Garibaldi brigades and a battalion of Soviet partisans, under major Roy Farran. The charge was sounded on the bagpipes, played by the Scot David Kirkpatrick who had parachuted in a kilt onto the Apennines a few days earlier. Three British paratroopers died; the Germans had sixty dead and wounded and the command post was destroyed. Precisely because the action was classified as military and not partisan, there was no reprisal against the people of Albinea.