Morciano di Romagna

For centuries Morciano was a market and little else, and the market belonged to other people. The first document that names it is the Codice bavaro, the register of the investitures of the Church of Ravenna, where a fundus Marcinus appears: a piece of land inhabited by those who worked it, with no civil entity at all. By 1014 it is already a castrum, and in 1061 saint Peter Damian founded, two kilometres away on the right bank of the Conca, the abbey of San Gregorio, which became the religious and economic centre of the whole lower Valconca: the people of Morciano moved onto the hills or passed under the monastery. In the fourteenth century the town is cut in two by the river — the right side to the comune of Montefiore, the left, with the mills, to that of San Clemente — and what is left of it is called in the statutes a forum, an emporium. It was Montefiore that fixed the weights, the measures and the duties of the goods brought to the Morciano markets, and it made a good deal out of it.

In the second half of the sixteenth century the councillors of Montefiore, seeing their own town in decline, decided together with the Apostolic Chamber to move the markets of Morciano inside the walls of their fortress. It did not work: after a few years the markets went back where they had been, and from that moment Morciano never stopped growing. In 1797 the French suppressed the abbey of San Gregorio and its goods went to a count from Rimini, who also brought into the town the fair of San Gregorio, held for centuries in the cloister of the monastery: it is still held every year in the second week of March, with the cattle market, the oxen, the sheep and the horses. Morciano became a comune of its own only in 1857, by decree of Pius IX. In the square named after Boccioni there is a sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro, who was born here in 1926.